Houses North of Pasco
2026
Digital photographs of glazed ceramic and found objects
In collaboration with Marion Mattson
Identifying through experiments with accenting: Following the lead of past works in understanding that decay itself is the identity of objects, we used clay scraps and doodles to respond to and legitimize the marks of time. Our scraps provide movement to the aging and cracking of the houses. This movement gives the grounds for the clay to then pivotally break away (oppose) to reveal and expand definition.
“Images blur so as to complicate and place into conflict. Arrangements of ceramic within the scene, which pieces are placed where in order to draw differences or similarities, make visible a set of relationships both harmonious and conflictual.
“There is not only a singular moment where images are captured but a series of litigations, a process that is scrambled, placed into suspension through the photograph, and in viewing returned to a state of seeming quiet--but meanwhile things have shifted. Ill Will Magazine, in an interview with Marquis Bey, describes this state as a pond floor disrupted; layers of sediment pushed upwards ‘stirring up all kinds of seemingly-uniform sediment into particles that combine and fall to the bottom in new forms.’ New proximities set into motion a different set of encounters.
“The houses and objects inside them are not flatly within a before or after--after habitation or before decay. They attempt to straddle an in between, the moment of clarity in a blur, the flash of an image alike to Walter Benjamin’s refrain that ‘the past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.’ It is an inwards and outwards motion, where no matter the shifting distance between beats there are always interruptions and openings, ‘several spaces within a space.’
“As how the experience of popular insurrection takes on a destituent character by returning potentiality to life and recovering through departure, the fields of force within the house are not imposed from outside but are already present participants these objects pull into the foreground. ‘There is nothing and no one ‘behind’ (or beyond) coming to save them’ (Rodrigo Karmy, ‘The Destituent Moment of the Chilean October’). The objects are slivers that glow, emerge, anchor, hit, camouflage, and shatter within.
“In the over-exposed windows of the upstairs pink room, the outside appears empty and we are left unable to place the house in a discrete setting or environment. Context telling us where the house could be found or what circumstances led to the present moment are out of reach, and its contents are suspended in nowhere -- not in their organized layers sedimented on the pond floor, and not in the disrupted ones either. They are in anticipation, in abstraction, in the past image seized in fleeting recognizability. This is an abstraction that pulls inwards rather than out, foregoing a topographical viewpoint for submergence. It is the ‘nowhere of utopia’ and nowhere of disintegration, overlapping sheer and gaussian (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments).
“A prism, reflecting and refracting in a multiplicity of directions dependent on light and angle. No consequence is predetermined. It is dependent on us to set in motion the world we desire.”
-Marion Mattson
“Gestures disclose what is at stake, the matter of life returns as an open question.”
-Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments