A House of Dust2015
Marissa Lee Benedict
A two-person exhibition with ︎︎︎Phil Peters at ︎︎︎Heaven Gallery (Chicago, US).
Link to video documentation of ︎︎︎verti.go.
Text below from the ︎︎︎exhibition take-away.
____
One of the earliest examples of computer generated poetry, “A House of Dust” is a collaboration by Fluxist artist Alison Knowles and composer James Tenney. Creating endless combinations of propositional architectures, landscapes, locations and situations, the randomly assembled four line quatrains of Knowles and Tenney’s poem grounds Benedict & Peter’s investigations into speculative histories, uncanny objects and strange systems of growth.
Overlaying the architecture of Heaven Gallery onto itself in such a ways as to re-align the gallery with Chicago’s grid, Benedict & Peters expose a ghostly architectural space: a framework for objects, actions and videos to occur upon, within and around.
In the front room, Benedict’s video and sculptural assemblages blow, whir, buzz and hum: rythmns reminicent of a HVAC system. Materials, both seen and unseen, are in slow but constant motion as objects and surfaces are disorientated and re-oriented in space. To the left, a used truck tire rotates on a conveyor belt with a single prarie grass plant strapped to its middle; to the right, a bit of yellow stucco wall supports a fan drying a bed of clay and salt at one end, while a hose drips water onto the other end; on the east facing wall, a software driven video is rear projected, filling the small retangle of light with endlessly rotating clips of quatrains from Knowles & Tenney’s poem set amongst video clips shot in Las Vegas (footage collected by Benedict) and Southern California (footage collected from YouTube).
a house of dust (an exercise in yellow)
computer generated video composition
2015
air.idity (an exercise in yellow)
kinetic sculptural installation (drywall, yellow paint, simulated stucco, plywood, steel, vinyl wall panel, clamps, air vent, fan, clay, garden hose, water)
2015
verti.go
kinetic sculpture (Switchgrass, found truck tire, motor, felt, plywood, ratchet straps, electrical cords, fluorescent light fixtures, 5’ conveyor belt section, casters)
2015
exercise in yellow 003
gouache on “rite in the rain” paper
2015
excercise in yellow 005
spray paint on “rite in the rain” paper
2015
___
Special thanks to: Lindsey french, Juan Luis Olvera, David Rueter, Alma Wieser.