Accumulation

Over the last year I have been engaged with a particularly interesting dialogue with the common 2x4. I have been trying to uncover its material potentiality and use it as a vehicle to discuss our current economic crisis and the plight that has afflicted contemporary man. Our civilization has been constructed in both a physical and metaphysical sense. I would argue that our world and the way we perceive it is the physical manifestation of our mental projections. We rarely are able to perceive what is in front of us clearly. We have become complacent with our own observations and have become reliant on secondary and tertiary knowledge to define our existence. In examining the 2x4 the preconceived notions of what a 2x4 is and what it is used for have stagnated our creativity of what its material affordances could be. A 2x4 is structural, used to build, it has an inherent strength. What if it wasn’t? In my investigation I have discovered a vast potential that lurks just beneath the thin veneer of its façade.
I envision a sea of potential frothing and writhing within the ordinary and mundane waiting to go beyond former constraints. I am curious to know what it is the 2x4 would like, if it were sentient, to be. For my project I will taking a single 2x4 and emptying it of its strength, of its stability, of all our preconceived notions of what it should be. I envision a river of potential pouring forth from the 2x4 itself.
I will do this by constructing a finely crafted 2x4 by hand. This 2x4 will be empty. Behind the surface, its façade, will be a space to fill with potential. The space that is contained within the veneer will then be poured out in the form of fine slices of wood, each piece representative of a possibility that has gone unacknowledged, unrealized, and unseen. These symbolic pieces of wood will flow across the floor accumulating, dividing up space, and making the viewer negotiate the world it occupies differently.