Statement — INFINITE REGRESS dot NET

Ava is an artist, a subsidiary of INFINITE REGRESS [READ MORE]

Artist’s Statement
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My work engages the theoretical-poetic possibilities of plasticity to render, refract, and metabolize life at the crest and looming trough of the Anthropocene. Plasticity denotes the capacity of one thing to both give form to, and take form from, another. As the world of objects becomes increasingly plastic——indeed plastic is predicted to outpace gasoline as the primary driver of fossil fuel demand——so too do discourse, narrative, and even image become reworked by a plastic hand. To see through a plastic lens is to reveal an ever-densifying and now inescapable entanglement between humans and the materials we have synthesized.

This entanglement between humans and things produces a vast debris field of epistemic and aesthetic juxtapositions that are the objects of my abiding fascination. My practice involves scavenging this debris field, moving between disparate deposits as if pacing a labyrinth. Through this forensic and transitory activity I give form to the connective tissue of a unified artistic body through a bricolage of research, image-making, personal archive, and narrative. Objects, symbols, methods, and thought-structures uncovered at one debris site are enthusiastically (re-)employed as dredging tools at another, manufacturer’s instructions be damned. An inquiry into mass-production, for example, might assert itself through my collection of hastily spray-painted chalkware animals, past the traveling carnival midway where they once waited as prizes 80-odd years ago, and back around to mass-production through a favorite spiritual trap-door: the idea that the inevitable slight variation or occasional manufacturing error among mass-produced objects might, through the magic of chance, ensoul them.

Working the debris field of my practice offers a way of seeing around and beyond that only continues to feel more vital as climate collapse intensifies. My embrace of plasticity is a defiant attempt at survival as a human being in a world that is tipping past the human, as if turning towards my attacker in an attempt, however futile, to free myself. In so doing I have uncovered, inchoate in the same material that has remade the world in humanity’s own image——an image that is now degrading as much as it is creating itself——a way of continuing to live that rejoices in beauty despite, among, and even because of these conditions. In the words of philosopher and plastic ontologist Catherine Malabou, “plasticity thus refers to the possibility of being transformed without being destroyed.”