Unknown Scavenger, 2023
18in. x 12in. x 12in.
(see material list at bottom of page)
Unknown Scavenger, 2023
18in. x 12in. x 12in.
i. 4 years of chewed double mint gum (2017-2021)(Providence, RI & Queens, NY)
ii. “excavated vintage human glass eyes age 1890 Lauscha Mueller – Uri German A 3800” purchased from “sir_flacon” who notes “they where (sic) found while digging in factory yard ruins in Limbach in Thuringia Germany” (Nürnberg, Germany)
iii. plaster skull portion found on Linden Street in front of Miss Cherry Delight’s apartment (Ridgewood, Queens, NY)
iv. “1 box Alloy Pin Porcelain Teeth Material Colors Shade A3 24# full set” from denta_24h (ZhengZhou, Henan, China)
v. copper refrigerant tubing salvaged from discarded air-conditioning units and refrigerators found on street (Ridgewood, Queens, NY) (tagged, CFCs recovered)
vi. copper plumbing fittings purchased from used parts reseller on eBay from user tinman5711 (Plainfield, IL), 608scorpio159 (Winona, MN), electronics_plus (Hingham, MA)
vii. copper jewelry wire from closeout wholesale dealer ‘Wolf E Myrow’ (Providence, RI) and reclaimed from discarded electrical wire from dumpster (Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY)
viii. plumbing solder from industrial manufacturer liquidation auction (Taunton, MA)
ix. aluminum stock purchased in bulk at auction from machine shop closing inventory liquidation (Englewood, NJ)
x. “1/2- 1-¼ in. Stainless Steel Hose Clamps” purchased from Home Depot (Maspeth, Queens, NY)
xi. “10-24 1.25-inch 18-8 Stainless Steel Socket Head Cap Screws” purchased from Grainger (Maspeth, Queens, NY)
xii. stainless steel wood screws (origin unknown)
“the ground”
This was a low year. A year spent looking at the ground. A year spent walking, outdoors, alone or with others. Spent looking at the sidewalk, at the things people were throwing away. This was a year spent trying to find the value in the least of what we had, of what we had been taking for granted. This was a year I spent in part by visiting every major cemetery in the 5 boroughs of New York City, where I live. This was a year I also spent digging in the ground at various informal archeological sites across the city; from Dead Horse Bay to municipal construction sites after-hours.
“the ground'“ is a years-long sculptural body of work begun in the summer of 2020 that consists of a large scale sculptural installation exploring grief, public spaces, and reclaiming the value of things we’ve thrown away. Through this project, I have been constructing a funerary monument to late-stage American capitalism using material reclaimed and salvaged from shuttered retail businesses, industry, and the consumer recycling stream, along with imagined portraits and partial figures made from donated medical scans of individuals suffering from manufacturing and industry-related cancers.
This current body of work is based in deep research into the monuments of mourning and memorialization across the American landscape. It is also based in deep research of the history of American industry and resource extraction. It is also an exploration of the production of commercial ‘value’ and the physical and spiritual cost of that ‘value’. The work in this project is made of reclaimed material collected from the street, sidewalks, side-yards, alleys, and other interstitial public spaces of the cities of the American northeast during the coronavirus pandemic. Because of this shared origin, the conditions of the physical, social, and economic landscape of a late-stage capitalist American metropolis inflect the material, and thus content of the work; loss, mourning, decay, resourcefulness, and scrapping fragments together in the face of failing systems.
Product-display stands, shelving, and countertops from pandemic-shuttered retail businesses. Copper refrigerant tubing salvaged from discarded AC units and broken refrigerators left under highway overpasses. Stranded wire from broken earbuds and shattered electronics. Tile and masonry fragments from building demolitions. Ceramic shards from 150-year-old municipal dumping sites. 420-million-year-old fossil lime cement from a decommissioned mine that supplied the material for the base of the Statue of Liberty. These irreducible material fragments, their history, and their poetics, are the conceptual and emotional center of this exhibition.
These reclaimed materials are used to compose funerary monuments for the public who have been irreparably harmed by systems of commerce. Imagined portraiture is made using a DIY forensic facial reconstruction technique enacted on anonymized skulls rendered from an online cancer imaging database of CT scans. A pair of legs is cast in a faux terrazzo using reclaimed cement and the contents of boxes left on the curb from when a neighbor passed away. A sarcophagus is made using a discarded mini fridge and cement casts of Styrofoam packing inserts collected from neighborhood recycling, covered in mosaics using tile and 19th ce. ceramic fragments dug up from the incidental archaeological site of a municipal sewage work site. A statue of a priest giving sacrament is made from salvaged refrigerator tubing and a full quarantine years’ worth of chewing gum. The thing held in common by all of the physical elements of the exhibition is that I could only collect them because no one else felt they had any remaining value. This is the liberatory quality we can look for in the material of waste streams. This work proposes that what has been drained of its worth within a capitalist framework now affords the opportunity to be reimagined and reused as something of a radically different order, something that speaks of elegy, care, and remembrance.