Wether

Wether
2015

For the month of March at Chapter NY

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In the summer of 2014, Nicole Russo and I started planning a show at her gallery Chapter NY together. The gallery is a single room. It has a recessed doorway that is also a window, and an air conditioner pierces the glass above the door. The gallery faces south and receives direct sunlight, so the shade in the window is always drawn. A temperamental radiator sits on the floor. Steam from the city’s underground steam system emerges from the street out front.

Perhaps as a way to manage anxiety over the complexity of urban systems, I tend to think of rooms, buildings, and cities as objects and lift them into the air or place them in a body of water to consider them in isolation. Then I start to connect them to the necessary infrastructure and surrounding objects step by step - I attach earth’s atmosphere, the sun, the electrical grid, the water supply system, and so on, building towards a complexity that could never be processed. If artwork were to perform this attachment exercise through its presence, it would have the power to change the atmospheric conditions of the object/room it is displayed in and create a less stable understanding of “the room,” pushing beyond the limits of what is typically defined as “the gallery.” As if one were standing in a dissipating cloud of steam, trying to demarcate it as an object/room.

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Steam Stack
plastic, steam

Robin Williams window shade
vegetable tanned leather, acrylic paint, 3D powder print, steel chains, swimbait fish hooks

shower chair
custom powder coated steel shower chair

dog song air conditioner vacancy cover
laser-cut karelian birch burl veneer

dog song ringtone (collaboration with Nick Bastis)
ringtone on gallerist's phone

those are mosquito bites on the back of his head

cow and copper radiator cover/ humidifier
hair on hide leather, copper alembic still, copper coil, brass hooks, steam, stainless steel funnel, glass bottle, vodka, alcohol infusion

mosquito city-room-computer
mosquito larvae, mosquitos, anodized aluminum custom computer case, acrylic, blooming plant, mosquito netting, water, mosquito feed, steam, On Golden Pond by Mark Rydell (1981), microphone, lambskin condom, human blood

infused vodka

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