SECURITY AS A STATE OF VIOLENCE
Quilts / "Security Blankets"
Grief, 2019. 66"x90". Cotton.
 (Detail) Grief, 2019.
Grief is a splintered being - fractured, pained, incredulous, and mourning. On one side an entity gazes out, but is inaccessible. On the other, its subjectivity is liquidated in the logistical mania of the stitches. The quilt is a dual apprehension, following Judith Butler, of lives lived in the complicity of violence, suspended in a mode of individualized existence and those obliterated by violence but in their erasure, betray the emptiness of a normative "humanity." The blanket also arises from a reading of Black theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's concepts of the hold and containerization. Used by them to situate the violence of logistics in the trans-Atlantic chattel slave trade and its on-going legacies, the hold simultaneously generates the "terrible gift" of the "undercommons" where "dispossessed feelings [were gathered] in common, to create a new feel." "A feel not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem." Grief describes what it is like to lose, but also to lose what it is that is lost - as they say, "the refusal of what has been refused." To look out, to look in, and feel an ineffable gaping void. And, to be beside oneself, out of one's self, and to lose oneself in a greater space of "bounded beings." To have worlds collapse into none. To break into innumerable, enmeshed fragments.
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(Reverse detail) Grief, 2019.
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Security Blanket I-X, 2019. Each 19"x 25". Cotton.
Security Blanket (I-X) interprets Eyal Weisman's concept of the "Threshold of Detectability," which describes a tactic of drone warfare: "killing is undertaken in high resolution, and the investigation in low." The resolution (or pixelation) of publicly available satellite imagery is coarse enough due to "privacy" concerns to obscure much of the devastation wrought by "efficient warfare" and "surgical strikes." The perpetrators of such violence have intimate knowledge of what is beyond the threshold, which is to say death, but hide behind the legal structure of "plausible deniability." The blankets' surfaces play with pixelation, perspective, and abstraction to stitch together a fractured narrative of drone warfare. The blankets extend the concept of the "Threshold of Detectability" into cultural, political, and personal realms. They ask who is being wrapped, shrouded, veiled, suffocated, and straight-jacketed by the security blanket/state.
Together, Security Blanket (I-X) and Safariland: Capital's Menagerie physically interpret how violent ideology is created and sustained in our society. An adult hangs the mobile and confines the child in the crib. Similarly, an adult lovingly sews and presents a blanket to a child. The child grows up, leaves the crib, and casts off the security blanket, but liberation is evasive. Instead, the child is recruited to participate - enrolled in a life fabricating myths that obscure the violence latent in security (and society), patching thread-bare contradictions, and incessantly extending the blanket's reach.
They are also an attempt to construct a politics of departure, or perhaps more apt, a departing politics. While it gives form to the entities that must be abolished (and thus instantiating them), the installation does it reflexively, burying them conterminously in the act of creation. Nature is employed, but as a flat marionette, revealing its form as simulacrum. The Child appears, but dead, exploited, foreclosed upon. The lifelessness of the Child (fenced off, handcuffed, bagged, buried) betrays the projected hope that children so naturally elicit. Instead this Child reveals life as extraneous, as mere fodder. The Child is collateral: a site of expropriation and exploitation, a locus of future profit. In burying the proverbial Child, we also do the same with the Future (and its underlings, Progress, Development, and History). Apprehending how these ideas are employed in the present, reveals only violence and death. And thus, to bury the notion of Hope, Nature, Futurity, and the Child altogether, coffins lay. The coffins are an omnipresent reminder that perpetually waiting-for-departure existences are predicated upon individual and social death. But also, only through apprehending this death, can it be buried, can its value be removed, can we start departing. Doing so is a strange endeavor. What/who is departing? Where/When does it leave (us)? What is a life of departing?
They are also an attempt to construct a politics of departure, or perhaps more apt, a departing politics. While it gives form to the entities that must be abolished (and thus instantiating them), the installation does it reflexively, burying them conterminously in the act of creation. Nature is employed, but as a flat marionette, revealing its form as simulacrum. The Child appears, but dead, exploited, foreclosed upon. The lifelessness of the Child (fenced off, handcuffed, bagged, buried) betrays the projected hope that children so naturally elicit. Instead this Child reveals life as extraneous, as mere fodder. The Child is collateral: a site of expropriation and exploitation, a locus of future profit. In burying the proverbial Child, we also do the same with the Future (and its underlings, Progress, Development, and History). Apprehending how these ideas are employed in the present, reveals only violence and death. And thus, to bury the notion of Hope, Nature, Futurity, and the Child altogether, coffins lay. The coffins are an omnipresent reminder that perpetually waiting-for-departure existences are predicated upon individual and social death. But also, only through apprehending this death, can it be buried, can its value be removed, can we start departing. Doing so is a strange endeavor. What/who is departing? Where/When does it leave (us)? What is a life of departing?
