Polar-Opposite forms of the third ground
2022
30”x30”x65”
Deconstructed projector, fan, custom printed velour fabric with 5 days of CA seismographic data. The form is modeled from Benjamin Brett’s schematics of “The horn-shaped onde corolla” as delineated in his book, Geometrical Psychology, or, The Science of Representation. Paper mache, wood, pearlite, and mica stand.
For some wild stories about the form, pls continue ❤:
The tulip-like form in the pic is modeled after schematics drawn by Benjamin Betts in 1887. Betts was a hermit-y trigonometric computor who had a hard time communicating his ideas to others and was possibly living with some form of phenomenal (felt) madness. He made mathematical formulas in which numbers represented emotions and poetic equations created geometric forms… which he drew. He called his system geometrical psychology. Betts drawings were a part of a larger aesthetic movement during the victorian era that applied enlightenment era Reason to occult and mystical phenomena via diagramming and charting the unknown in visual art. Like in the work of many of his contemporaries, traces of social darwinism, humanism, Orientalism, and gendered polarities are apparent in the conceptualization of his metaphysics.
Each panel of this sculpture is upholstered with a printed fabric that depicts a unique 24 hour period of CA seismic activity. The surface of the sculpture indicates the existence of earthquakes, legible to the viewer only through the visual representation of seismographic data - an aesthetic language that says more about the desire to predict and contain the earthquake than it does about the phenomenal experience itself.
What i see in this big soft earthquake egg is aesthetic language of victorian era mystical schematics and diagrams, scientific data, lots of ideologies that are at the core of queer, gender variant, mad, neurodivergent shame and marginalization, projections and reflections, all around an unpredictable and moving ground that is only made visible through these other reference points.
I see all that visual language moved thru the hands of a person that holds those identity markers and learned techniques from and collaborates with people with those markers and who feelsss that the ground isn't actually solid or stagnant. And creates a moment out of out of all that info where we look fucking good and can feel the soft pleasurable freaky poetry.