garage surveil, 2023, Chicago, found objects and live camera projections
A collection of objects are scattered and grouped in various situations across a room. Consumer grade cameras are positioned within, beside, and atop these object vignettes. The live camera feeds are carried through USB extension cables drawn across the floors and walls, managed in ways both practical and decorative. Hazy live images are projected at the position and aspect ratio of paintings on the walls around the space, abstract compositions of layered live camera feeds.
The affect of these humble, used objects is a blend between heirloom and something that could have been heirloom with a different life. Objects find themselves in vignettes that resemble both the cacophonous arrangement of donated goods in a resale shop and in other
instances the kind of presentational just-so-ness of precious things atop a mantle. A viewer could find the materials list in a plastic insert near the door and access more information about the items, such as: table leaf from the artist’s great great great grandmother’s writing table where she spent many of her days writing letters to her grand daughters urging them to join the DAR1. A viewer might also notice that some items still wear their $1.00 resale shop pricetags, or may consult the materials list and learn that the rusted tools in the orange milk crate were purchased for a quarter a piece from a yard sale after the passing of a stranger’s father in a suburb north of Chicago. Three postcard size photographs are situated among the assemblages showing the artist’s grandfather’s mobile park in Fort Myers, Florida after Hurricane Ian in 2022.
The arrangements of objects have a humor, an absurdity in them, but also an incredibly precise logic in that the images are anchored in a translation between camera, object, and a layering of points of view. There is an underlying sense of panic, marking out some of the big psychological backdrops of what it means to be in the United States, as a culture right now. The very specific American definitions of freedom and liberty are under an incredible stress test, across generations trying to understand the value of ownership and private property and the concept of property itself. This sort of base anxiety propelled the capitol insurrection on
January 6 2022 with the question of whether or not people get to continue to have the things they believe they’re entitled to. We hold to the safety of our belongings as part of our identity and power. At a flea market you find a milk crate full of garbage without a price. You ask how much. Its $30 for an old wrench. The person will not negotiate and keeps repeating “I know what I’ve got.”
This is an American sensibility of over-valuing based on family history, sentimentality and narratives projected in this cathexis with our objects. We find ourselves in this impossible situation as late generation Americans, where we kind of actually need an ecological disaster to clear out our previous generations stuff so that we don’t have to figure out what to do with it when we fall upon the occasion of parents dying.
At the holidays in recent years, Home Depot and Lowes continue running out of tiny surveillance cameras. How precious are the things we share? However great or small, how little else means much to me. Sweetheart, you are my all becomes an abstract, absurd and tensely realistic microcosm of this sensibility to install cameras at home so no one will take your stuff.
The work extrapolates on this condition by using the live camera feeds to create abstract projected paintings, made up of compressed perspectives on what is excessively on hand in late stage capitalism in a country that became a manufacturing superpower and has more stuff than any of us could know what to do with. Live cameras put these images in a tension between harmony and collapse at all times. Even as the installation presents the arrival at a seemingly refined series of abstract images, collapse is always lingering around the corner, it is never out of the question.