2024 - For "Built Narratives" at Vesper Austin.

- Words by Marcus Clarke:

This show uses “to construct” and “to deconstruct” as verbs to explore the implications of physical and mental construction on our physical and mental environments. Through the works of Jay Jones, Thomas Cook, and Seth Daulton, we can explore how physical construction, a symbol of growth, has profound effects on our environment, communities, social inequities, and our ideas of safety and stability. These effects move from physical space to psychological, and from there, we can explore how, inside our cognitions, we are continually constructing and deconstructing. I’d like to think of my own mental maps and frameworks to be like that on a northern construction rhythm, either in a mode of rapid and intentional change or of concreteness, hunkering down for the winter. Yet, in reality, mental concreteness is never actually set, always changing by new inputs and cognitive dissonance. By interpreting and sitting with the dissonance that construction and industry have on our built environments and our psyches, we can hold well and appreciate our constantly shifting interior and exterior landscapes.

My current work is focusing on the reimagining of ‘ordinary objects’, creating a paradox and a narrative for viewers to rethink something they have preconceived interpretations of. Almost exclusively using traditional materials, I am elevating the mundane and pushing the ordinary into a different realm.

Ceramic has an aptness to take on any shape, surface or color. As a material, it has been used as precious material for millenia, while simultaneously providing basic serving functions in impoverished parts of the world to this day. My sculptures are somewhere right in the middle of that spectrum, blending production, craft and fine art.

Brand Name Products [2019] is inspired by pop art and consumerism. Recreating cheap, mass produced product packaging and rebranding them. I slipcast bottles bought from a generic store with ceramic and glaze them with commercial glazes. Then custom designed decals are fired onto the glazes. The end product starts to resemble the shiny plastic of the original packaging and the custom designs are recognizable as popular brands.

2015

Moore’s Law (suspended)
Low fire ceramic, braided filament 11 ft x 16 ft x 8 ft
Post Silicon (floor)
Low fire ceramic, oxides, steel trash cans 37 in x 70 in x 28 in

Accelerating Returns addresses the consumer’s role in the ever-increasing speed of technological development and critiques humanity’s desire for, and dependency on, technology.. Consumer demand is both driving and responding to the rapid release of high-tech products.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, demonstrated that technology grows at an exponential rather than linear rate. Moore’s forecast is that technology will reach a level of sophistication at which it will self-update and advance at an incomprehensible rate. Corresponding to the rate of technological growth, for the millennial gen- eration, the perception of time between newly released and obsolete has shortened drastically. Relatively young programs and devices are rapidly dated to the point of evoking nostalgia.

The arrangement of suspended devices in Moore’s Law is based on the graph Moore constructed to illustrate the drastic rise in the number of transistors in integrated circuits over the past forty years. Post Silicon depicts the same objects in a future that is warped or distorted, where we view them as being severely outdated and older than they actually are.

Though influenced by data visualization artists and new media, this work is constructed in traditional sculpture materials. Employing a primal material and low-tech methods to replicate contemporary technological items and ideas creates an ironic duality.

Chicken Nugget Checkers [2019] was a performance piece based off the World Chess Championship in 1972 between Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union and Bobby Fischer of the United States.

2014

The intention for this piece is to ask the viewer to examine the line that is
becoming continuously more blurry between man and machine. Navigation, communication, organization and entertainment are examples of everyday tasks that seemingly now require a form of technology. More specifically, cell phones, are the replacement of human imagination when boredom or a dull moment strikes, hindering our capability to actively think alone.

By choosing to make a mosaic out of cell phones, a juxtaposition is created between the historical tradition of mosaics, and the modernity of technology. Mosaics were made in the past to depict human activity in everyday life, I wanted my imagery to serve more as a reflection of who we are and how we function in everyday life.The materials traditionally used for mosaics ranged anywhere from glass pieces to marble, the Byzantines would even paint gold leaf onto their glass pieces, treating each piece as an item of high value. By using cell phones as the tessera, or the material used  for each tile, I am commenting on the materials of today, as well as objects that we value, by relating them back to the gold leaf and marble used in the past.

This series’ purpose is to explore the relationship that we have with not only our cell phones, but our technology as a whole, as well as bring to light the transformation from amenity to necessity that our technology has undergone.

2013

Video