Interior Motives refers to the agentive role of the overlooked minutia of the everyday and also the impossibility of grasping the experience of a thing. These non-human entities persist with or without an audience and actively shape not only our reality but, importantly ecology and yet recede from our full comprehension.
“The key , the inner formula of a mango, a willow tree or a flat smooth stone, is never grasped; the real thing is before our perception as a task for exploration. But the real thing is not the sum of all that we have recorded of it; it closes in upon itself, remains exterior, always beyond all that our perceptual samplings have turned up of it, not a given but an external ordinance.” - Alphonso Lingis
These quotidian moments are the outcome of a refocusing of attention and a somewhat futile ontological exploration into a life closer to the ground. Specific moments of urban banality from Phoenix, Brooklyn and Chinatown are recreated as mysterious samplings and urge consideration of these lively things as active players in this world.
I am interested in the way we underestimate the power of things in our lives and how that underestimation has time and time again lead to public health crisis as well as a shocking and drastic reshaping of ecology and climate. It is an ongoing topic of debate to grant “life” to inanimate things and to locate agency within them. Stepping away from the hubristic view of human life as special and by going as far to recognize the existence of things: man-made things, organic things, elemental things as having “life” ultimately only helps human life as we depart from our anthropocentrism and recognize that things beyond their use-life, or function, have the ability to cause great and ominous change. Our engagement and consideration of our material culture is in need of a philosophical overhaul, these sculptural installations are created with that in mind and attempt to transcend the gallery space by, even in the slightest, shifting the viewers perception and engagement with their surroundings.