Killing Vines Shattering Perception
 

The work began with an invitation from a gallery to develop a Liste Basel proposal one week before the deadline. I entered an intense period of production around a structure that seemed imminent. Afterwards, the proposal remained suspended for months while I waited to understand whether it would happen and what form the gallery wanted it to take. The work had already begun consuming labour and material before its own future had acquired a stable form. That instability became part of its logic.

The original booth separated perception across different surfaces. Inverted photographic negatives of trees were translated into silkscreens whose colour becomes increasingly perceptible as the viewer approaches. On the floor, traces of my own steps were cut into acoustic felt. Transducers beneath it allowed electromagnetic recordings to arrive through pressure in the body. The vines crossed these fields. I cut them after their growth had already produced a gesture, then began enclosing that gesture in copper through a process governed by current, chemistry and duration.

As the proposal remained unresolved, the relation between those processes changed for me. The vine is held inside an electrical system long enough for another material to accumulate around it. The artist enters another circuit in which an invitation generates labour while visibility and value remain suspended somewhere ahead. I began thinking about my own position almost as an electron moving through that proposal market.

The three modes of absorption in the installation then became entangled with another suspended economy. A gaze has a duration before it becomes attention; attention can become desire; somewhere else, that desire acquires cost. I am interested in the point where those forms of charge touch while remaining capable of separating again.