From the Surface

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Morgan Wedderspoon

• From the Surface is an exhibition haunted by the presence of the global ecological crisis. As I implicate the viewer in a web of associations between word, image, and thing, I invite contemplation of our place in a changing world. I seek to unsettle the comfortable illusion that humanity is separate from nature, exploring instead the anxiety of being inextricably embedded in a context that is radically and unwittingly being transformed by our own hands.
  Through a chance-based practice of found-object collection and display, I search for unforeseen materials gathered from the ground to participate as subjects in my work. The resulting collection is an assortment of artifact-like objects, many which were formerly overlooked, discarded, or forgotten. More specifically, they are fragments – worn pieces of things that have broken down and dispersed, travelling across unknown distances. The gesture of collecting marks a momentary acknowledgement of coexistence between humans and things within the context of unfolding ecological crisis. As a group, the objects act as a humble reminder of that context, in which the dream of human dominion over nature is called into question. In a broad sense, my collecting practice addresses the tension between the urge to try to exert control over the material world and a sense of being caught under its spell.
  Using printmaking, I highlight the potential for unexpected relationships between the objects, bringing them into new formal associations and exchanges. By displaying the objects themselves alongside the prints that derive from them, I construct a network around the viewer, a back and forth between the real, the representational, and the abstract. From the Surface enmeshes the viewer in the struggle to reconcile physical experience with the conceptual realm – lending a heightened sense of reality to a crisis that we know is unfolding, but which tends to lurk in the background of our everyday experience.

• Date created

  2016-02-23

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Philosophy
  • Photo-intaglio
  • Collection
  • Dark ecology
  • Digital print
  • Chine collé
  • Anthropocene
  • Fine arts
  • Consumerism
  • Printmaking
  • Letterpress
  • Archaeology
  • Woodcut
  • Walter benjamin
  • Decay
  • Poetry
  • Timothy morton
  • Found object
  • Ecology

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R37659N07

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International