RECONSTRUCT

Prompted by my own complicated history with physical pain and its compromising effect on my stability, Reconstruct is an exhibition of sculptural work that examines a body in pain’s history and questions its future.  The work is comprised of vertical structures made from dimensional lumber and concrete that act as surrogates for my own scale and posture.  Once built, the wooden elements of the structures are broken or fractured and put back together using wooden props, heavy hardware, rope, and tension.  Through the process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, the once symmetrical structures lose both previous integrity and stability.  The process mirrors the debilitating effect physical pain has on the human body and the medical community’s finite ability to relieve the pain and restore prior function to the body. 

The sculptural work is separated into three types of structures: the broken and/or fractured, the separated and/or reconstructed, and the disappeared and/or removed.  Through these three categories of visual exploration and expression the work expands the lens and audience of pain, each having a different relationship to time, violence, former use, and future possibility.  The use of mundane construction materials throughout serves a dual purpose.  First, the visual vocabulary of construction is something immediately familiar to the viewer as an integral part of our daily surroundings.  The process of building is something we are accustomed to seeing in varying states of completion.  By seeming impermanent and in process the work addresses pain’s continually damaging effect on the stability of the body.  Secondly, the use of basic construction material serves as a method to distance the work from the potential sensationalism of physical pain, prompting a contemplative rather than visceral impulse from the viewer.  The additional videos of my legs and feet performing simple repetitive tasks ground the work in the actual body, acknowledging the specific source and further, questions of stability, function, and limits. 

Elaine Scarry explains the most problematic component of physical pain is its “resistance” to language in her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.  Through the creation, destruction, and reconstruction of my work, it is my goal that the sculptures sidestep the language barrier and individual nature of pain.  Further, through this elusion to conventional language, the work allows the opening up of a different dialogue centered on both the effect (the past) and the possibility (the future) of the broken and traumatized structure, and by extension, a location for the previously isolated body (the present).