How to digest a fleshing eating machine at The New Wight Gallery UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
How to digest a fleshing eating machine is an attempt to document, dissect, and rationalize a few of the many macroaggressions executed by the State through a logic of material understanding. In its unquenchable hunger for never-ending profit, the Machine consumes, grinds down, immolates, and spits out the lives of people and the planet, leaving broken and discarded bodies in its wake. This process both predicates and fuels its ongoing existence. It is necessary to its function and it cannot be reformed. Singling out any one specific element of the system will never fully address the root of this hydra-tic equation, even if it appears to be more feasible than exploring multifaceted solutions. Therefore this project’s ambition is to support emancipation from the machine by constructing a coalition of militant thought residing in the past and present. To do so, I use the Machine’s regurgitated detritus to delineate some of the interconnected networks through which it proliferates. Yet by activating this debris as both inspiration and material, I seek to engage alternative ways of looking at the matter. Finding appreciation and care for discarded materials becomes an avenue to express the same sentiments for those people who have been used and discarded by the system. This remedy is understated and rarely acknowledged within the Machine, which has constructed a terrain based on the logic of scarcity and individual survival. Within this context, we’re indoctrinated and taught to ignore our ability to care for and sustain one another.
