Casting Contigency
is an exploratory project that investigates cycles of regeneration, notions of sustainability, and invisible labors which takes place behind closed door both industrially and creatively to highlight the nature of creativity itself as a renewable resource. The act of recycling here is the meta-concept-process of my artmaking.
The Process: For the entirety of 2018, I sourced and cast all the empty voids of plastic packaging from my own recycling bin. In the casting process accidents happen. Imperfect slippages serve as palpable metaphors emphasizing our need as a society to expand our thinking into new and unexpected channels. These new forms are at once familiar yet strange ghosts of the objects they once housed. Truncated in form and deprived of practical use, these objects serve as surrogates for the things we choose to ignore and overlook in our past, while being undeniably present. In turn, they ask the viewer to negotiate a different and new understanding of where and how to cast agency going forward. The choice of plaster is deliberate. The “colorlessness” of the plaster acts as a a democratizing force that keeps these objects on the same level of importance. It allows for an undoing and re-envisioning of what “could be”. The large tableau of castings read as a strange past present and future cityscape of possibilities yet to be named.
The Residency: In 2019, this project took shape as a residency and slowly-morphing installation at the Institute of (Advanced) Uncertainty (I.O.U) in San Francisco, which apropos to its namesake was itself a fleeting phantasma - so prescient in light of our current covid pandemic. At I.O.U. displayed en masse, they had the architectural look of a futuristic cityscape. The move from studio to storefront presented an opportunity to play with new juxtapositions and interventions in space and time. It was open to the public through its run, giving passers-by a chance to watch me work and engage in conversation about the installation and the state of the environment, sustainability and civilization at large.
Suspended Animation: In 2020 with the onset of covid and perpetual cycles of quarantine, the installation came full circle in its destruction and return to its raw material state (powdered gysum) ready for re-invention, apropos of the time we are currently in, where nothing is as we know it, familiar yet unknown, ripe for new ways of experiencing the former patterns of our life and contemplating what paradigm shifts could be.
Inspirations: Nature, Chance, the Anthropocene, Eco-Guilt, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities