(they/them)
An artist engaging with virtuality, ecology, sexuality, perception, labor, memory, and time
CV
As exhibited in ‘infinite dynamic horizons’
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Brooklyn, NY
MAY 14-JUN 19, 2022
Two-person show w/ Sydney Shavers, curated by SiSi Chen
The turning of a wheel, the turning that iterates the wheel, the grinding that grinds the wheel to a stop. Motion after all matter ceases. A dissipating vibration and a force that is still—so that there may be vibration. All of it and none of it sufficiently speaks. It becomes a horizon that approaches and then is surpassed. Its surpassing reveals a sphere, or moreso, the motion of a sphere.
As I watched her pass, I saw this horizon, and then I saw its passing. And then our distance from her passing, which, after several beats (heart beats or human seconds?) vanished into a spiral. Since then, there have been so many beats that their distance is calculated by the fact of their presence, so that in the present I am as close to her as I am far.
The past compressed—her journey, my journey. It compressed into me.
I see wheels everywhere as I ride my bike. Hubcaps, more specifically. Circular perforations in their metallic surfaces watch me, like eyes. I pass them by the side of the road, sometimes whole, usually fractured. Traces of a cataclysmic event. The particles produced by an atomic collision, which evidence the force that determines their mass. A motor, a spindle, a hip socket.
For a moment, they are recovered, in my picking them up. What remains when everything is stripped away. The asymptotic present: the wheel, the sphere, and the horizon—surpassing.
Remote Viewing is an installation with CNC-fabricated, cast, found, and electronic objects that present the virtual as material. Image-making —from cave painting to satellite technology, from the pulse of an electron along a copper wire to the appearance of a digital image on an LCD screen— is a history of recursive modes of seeing mediated by tools. This is not to except non-human forms of biomimicry. Rather, it is to address a scale of vision, without eyes as we know them, which sees and shapes the world. I study how recursivity relates to the perception of space and time, and its effects in the realms of planetary-scale computation, cosmotechnics, global industry and labor.
Objects in this installation made from found and recycled high-impact ABS plastic, often used in car manufacturing, are connected in a remote viewing system. "Remote viewing" is a term for remotely accessing cameras on networked devices through the internet. It is also a pseudoscientific belief that a person can see or perceive objects located elsewhere. For a person experiencing dementia, the latter is not out of the realm of possibility.
This work is about witnessing my grandmother in her final stages of dementia, during the first year of COVID-19, primarily through video calls. A parallactic experience. Grief magnified through the starkness of Zoom and the vastness of the ongoing global pandemic, as well as racial and socioeconomic pandemics afflicting Philadelphia. Broken auto parts I saw while cycling (my sole method of transportation) came to signify a grief carried through not only my reality, but also the enormously complex circulation of material both viral and industrial. The act of picking up pieces of ABS plastic, manufactured in China, Taiwan and scattered along Diamond Street, Master Street, Aramingo Avenue, is simultaneously greater than, less than and equal to the sum of total actions that constitute this situation. To imagine such an act as the origin point of an iterative process of making limits my work to a linear scope, a human narrative, a single author, a final product. And anyways, an origin is just a coordinate reference that must be assigned.
I am gleaning—giving care to— remnants of memory, and imagining a circumstance by which they break from a repetitive loop and recurse, drawing a long gesture through their evolving forms, bearing witness to the motion in which we are altogether situated, and one day all together again.
In loving memory of 梅秀娴 (Sau Han Moy Yee) (March 19, 1927, Shanghai - January 28, 2021, New York City).
-Charlotte G. Chin Greene, November 2021