Plenitude on Stilts

Plenitude on Stilts is an exhibition that dissects symbols of the fragility of human resource systems and that fragility’s relationship with one’s sense of identity. The show incorporates splintered, unfinished plaster casts of human hands, feet, and mouths along with anthropomorphized data visualizations. It repeats the figure of a single human head with a pompadour in various pieces, depicting it with casted shopping bags, distorted line graphs and wooden cross sections. On the other hand, the exhibition focuses on two plants: elm trees and maize (which have helped me explore my experience living in the US and The Netherlands), gathering instances where their artificial manipulation manifests in industry and culture.

Both plants are woven into our social histories, transforming in time with developments in agriculture, science, and globalism. They appear, unaltered, as symbols of a natural world, but they almost always come to us as result of complex human activities which strain and manipulate materials into the unrecognizable. Being surrounded by such artifacts affects us, courses through us, complicating our sensations and shading our worldly sensemaking.

As we (a Western, Eurocentric we) increasingly sense the fragility of the systems we have stumbled into, many of us harden at the idea of being so delicately suspended in a precarious material and semiotic environment. Emotions and ideas get brittle, and begin to shatter.

Seeing the industrial use of corn as analogous to the action of “autosubjectification” that is present in toxic meritocratic work culture in the US, The Man and the Unicorn, the video work which grounds the exhibition, stages two parallel monologues given by an animate ear of corn, passionate about ethanol production, and a suburban tri-state area father who has developed a foot fungus through his overconsumption of processed corn snacks.

Special thanks: Sophie Engert, Mika Kastner Johnson. Instruction and feedback: Anniek Brattinga, Danny van den Dungen, Jungmyung Lee, Armand Mevis, Batia Suter, Salim Bayri