Given the current situation, it feel like things are going to end one of two ways: either agents from the World Health Organization are going to come down our street, distributing covid vaccinations door-to-door like an ice cream truck, or a van full of fascist Proud Boys would come down the street for door-to-door Day of The Rope lynchings. And all I can do is quarantine here in my home with my plants and partner and cats, waiting to see which it will be. And neither eventuality is anything personal; it’s just part of being caught at the mercy of large systems.
That led me to thinking about what is still functioning, humming along just fine: capitalism and Amazon, drone delivery services and so on. And so each fear takes shape as something mechanical, impersonal, autonomous and efficient.
These forms are similar to things I have made before, but those efforts initially were just problem solving and enjoying technique, and then later used to explore interpersonal boundaries and closure within relationships. They also were incredibly fragile and susceptible to mishandling, as demonstrated by the destruction of an exhibition of previous works. You can’t plan for chaos.
This time around I still made them according to how the found materials naturally fit together. I found the shapes and connections that way, but then I secured each join with glue or string and a unifying coat of paint. This makes the work less about negotiating with technique and how they are assembled and more about the visual language of industrial design and mechanism. They look newly made, ready with primer to take the final coat of paint, livery brandings, and designations of purpose.
I do think of them as a pair, one perhaps more beneficent than the other, but both able to carry out whichever conclusion is necessary.
