Curatorial Statement, Return:

Return is a show of three artists who mine the things of the world for whispers, hints, stories, and questions. Reuse, for these artists, is the return of materials, things, and objects to this place where we can consider the fractured, not necessarily political, occasionally blunt and basic questions that things can ask of humanity. What does it mean to be ourselves in a world in which we are surrounded by our stuff, and the things and systems that come before and around us? When do we become our uniforms and accessories and when to they become us? What is the difference between how we relate to water when it is in a river, a faucet, a bottle, a bucket or in the blood in our veins? Does how we think of water outside us reflect a change in the way we treat each other? What are the mechanisms by which we make the emotional and truly personal lives we each do, in a drive-through world, in a world between these walls? What does it mean to care for cracks, to listen for the uncomfortable tipping point where the swirl of weather, the hum of the refrigerator, and the sound of one's own breath are indistinguishable?
A brief history of the life of a consumable good in the eye of the beholder, the consumer, me, you or your neighbor in the terms of this show:
The curtain rises with objects on a shelf or in a catalog somewhere, tightly, symbiotically surrounded by the glow of advertising, packaging, salespeople, pop-up windows, and the expectation and desire grows between hype and thing. Sometimes the product and its advertizable accessories feel indivisible as in the case of Coke and bottle, and other products whose packaging is perhaps more valuable or desirable than the thing it contains. Next, during the in-use phase, where an object is needed, even wanted at times, but already receding into the landscape surrounding its use, like camouflage clothing around a soldier's body fades into rock; like a board becomes the wall of a shed that eventually crumbles down among the vines; like a tire loses its identity and becomes the part of a car warranteed to connect seats, engines and radios to 60,000 miles of shimmering asphalt; like a bottle of water or soda becomes a part of the conditions of a particular shape and taste of drinking experience. And after use, what then for things?
We – individual human beings -- reuse some things, getting personally involved with them. Then again, we throw a lot away. All over the planet, in the recycling bin, in the trash, out the car window, over the bank, in the ocean, in the compost, in burn barrels, and sometimes just by leaving them somewhere in the weather and walking away. Reusing something that has been thrown away or left to rot is like asking a traveler for tales of foreign lands, or a boomerang what the air is like where it's been. What do things experience in their absence from our attention, in their time in the “away” of our throwing?
In this art show, things are not only reused because the artists believe in --and like-- reuse; things are mined for what they can tell us from their period of absence from the apple of our eyes. Perhaps they know what it sounds like when a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, or what turns a leaf takes on its way from branch to curb on a rainy deserted night, or from what horses and beaches come the hairs and sand grains that make for a crack's particular contours as old wall plaster lets loose after decades of tension. Perhaps they know also the passing of feet, tires, shoes over a single piece of ground, of roadside deals, of goodbye kisses, of the vibration of a single drop of oil hitting the asphalt of the road like a strange coming-home.
If there is one simple, persistent rumor that our discarded and reclaimed things speak of, it might be that human decisions and the worlds they make are not always based in a grid of rationality. What we know to work well, like recycling or exercising, is not always what we actually do. This art leaves questions of “doing” to each of us, calling instead for a pause in how we look around us, a return to an experience of the world before our positions and decisions were made, in which to witness the unknowable breadth, irrationality, wildness and multiplicity of this world that is increasingly of our making.