Journey from Longjiang

I seek to make visible the unseen relationships and resources that both support and undermine our everyday activities. I attempt to reconcile the abject and destructive nature of capitalist culture with the beauty that cannot be vanquished.

I take the most banal, lifeless, and overlooked matter, mechanically and repetitively produced, and reinvest it with what the Chinese call "li": the underlying patterns in organic nature which surprise and delight us, making us come alive.

Journey from Longjiang takes as its starting place the economic history of the building where the work is shown -- a former furniture retail store. As furniture manufacturing is increasingly outsourced to countries such as China and Vietnam to profit from lower standards of labor protection and environmental regulation, thousands of US jobs are lost, and the environmental impact of transcontinental shipping is profound.

The project includes both sculpture and video. The sculptures are made of packaging materials used to protect furniture in transit (foam cushions; large sheets of triple-ply foam and plastic; and cardboard). The foam and plastic (which the customer is oblivious to) are routinely landfilled or burned, creating highly toxic gases. transit, and which are routinely landfilled or burned, creating highly toxic gases.

Video tracks the transoceanic journey of the furniture.

Shown at Artspace, New Haven, CT. May-June 2010.



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