Surface Contents, PICA T:BA 2015 – Installation Shots

Surface Contents 1 employs 14 karat gold dust in a series of actions, architectural interventions, and a site specific video for Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2015 T:BA Exhibition, Pictures of the Moon with Teeth. The resulting work hopes to form a dialogue that sees gold as literal index of locatable value and something ever-shifting in meaning and immense influence.

I am interested in the potential for a sculpture to define a form that is unstable and conditional. In the past I have attempted to quantify the value of a room, building, or page by creating, at least temporarily, a condition that identifies and illuminates the whole. In this case gold dust, which carries a precise value by weight, could define a mass, cavity, or surface as a literal condition of value. The gold particles moving in the air become a sculptural form, a column of light, a dancing vibrating hive – simply to go away again. This work acts as a three-dimensional drawing describing otherwise less observable conditions of a building.

Through the use of a fugitive gesture luminously filling the volume contained within the architectural structures of an empty museum gallery, I hope to make visible the latent and immaterial conditions of this space of shifting value. I am interested in evincing a material that can substantiate an otherwise abstract notion of market conditions linked to real estate and speculation.