Upon My Tongue (left)
The Ether (right)
2017-2018
36” x 108”
letterpress*, digital inkjet, Tyvek, plexiglass, alcohol and water
Produced by enlarging medium format black and white film, the digital inkjet prints—reconfigured power and telephone lines—question an assumed, imposed, formal, and structural sense of (object) permanence, while supporting the letterpress text, which was printed in advance of these digital overtones. The material and processes used in these works questions both the role of the structures they depict and the material properties of the media itself, and the media (text) it supports.
The electrical and power lines—wires—present the potential of indefinite and limitless connectivity, of communication, through the harnessed and contained movement of a previously free electrical signal—waves. However, the physical deterioration the inkjet prints incur over time speaks to the fleeting nature of the relationship these wires have with the content they contain, and the potentiality of their release. The text, while remaining physically stable, also speaks to a fragility of means, and offers only an illusion of stability. It is merely another line, another wire, another method of containing, capturing, and moving but only into a dead-stop. An attempt to break this stop occurs in both the implementation of poetics and code, but stops again, when understanding ceases.
The slow bleeding out of the digital and the permanence of the text does not speak to the permanence of the medium, but negates it, by removing an element of structural context and replacing it with one fluid in nature—the context of water. The water, arguably the least stable, is understood as most tacit to the origin of content—the mind, the body—an electrically charged and ever-changing form that can can travel across and beyond all wires in waves.
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*Special thanks to Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum for making the production of this work possible.