The vast concrete terrain is so simple. It’s just a single material, a single color, predictable, functional, moldable. It fills my entire field of vision when I look in certain directions, like a blank canvas paving the way for the future. It goes on and on like a calm day at sea, reflecting the sun, then reflecting the moon. A deep breath held in for long enough can produce visions of dolphins jumping on the horizon. An exhale will then feed the forest in the distance and the dandelions that pop up through the cracks here and there.
Anything can become something else when donning a coat of abstraction made up of rogue parts and voids. Parts removed from their fully defined forms become adopted by default somewhere else. Their qualities are reevaluated relative to their new counterparts and then they are put to work as machines to produce new meaning. But the incessant quest for definition and purpose is only comfortable outside of these conceptual chop shops, dismissing their poetic practices as irrelevant in order to remain focused on the search for the place that has eradicated ambiguity once and for all. Wild vines cross the charted paths in a romantic dance that oscillates around the concept of certainty. Old factories work day and night to create new frames to ease this exhausting journey and territories become functionalized one by one. This ballet is a battle.
Mechanical philosophers continue to encourage this odyssey towards an imagined utopia of “knowing,” but the mystics have known all along that there is no way out of the forest. Their ideal thesis is a cement parking lot, but that gets new weeds every spring. Their paradise is a concrete jungle with no gaps between the buildings or guides with missing pages. Any moment that invites curiosity becomes a portal back to the center of the dark woods where swan feathers climb trees and become butterflies. The absolute absence of enchantment has been known to cause insanity actually. Our requirement just might be a reality of infinite nuances and subtleties that could never be held long enough to bind, where a conclusion is made of a thin veil that dissolves at twice the rate it is made. I believe it was Duchamp who coined the term “inframince” when examining frailty’s role in transformation. Newness enters at the weak points.
Hybrids enter at the joints. You know, the points of assembly between two things that give us agency to move around, change directions, pose, contort, embrace. You know, the things that monoliths don’t have and can’t do. They can be found in the anatomy of an animal at the elbow, on a car at the hinge, in the rainforest as camouflage, in language as metaphor. The bending and blending is both horrifying and fascinating, as everlasting as the vermin haunting the exterminator and as undervalued as the wildflowers plaguing our lawns. New junctions proliferate to wrap the planet like an web of amorphous patois, leaving puzzles for the scientists to solve and material for the dreamers to dream.
at Sentiment, Zurich
until July 15, 2023