DAMAGE
WITHOUT
INJURY
Damage Without Injury is a multimedia installation structured as a reading room and screening room, including artist books: The Epistemology of You, LOS ANGELES: a document, En Route to Find an Armchair, and the collaborative publication, Y(OURS), as well as the 2-channel HD video, Source Known (but withheld). The publications, made between 2015-17, include sites spanning Los Angeles (CA), Philadelphia (PA), and Pennsauken (NJ). Each publication uses intertextuality to create a throughline across multiple bodies of work, centering on the physiological relation between site and sight, desire and loss, and language and communication. The project utilizes writing and print and lens-based media to create multiple dialogues that exist between subjects – 'reader' and 'you' – and 'person of the dialogue' – explored through nonlinear narratives. Within each exchange, geography textures the surroundings as an embodiment of dislocation. In this past-present connection, memory drifts between multiple environments, interpersonal relationships, and philosophical questions of meaning and knowledge.
A central subject of both the books and video includes a swiftly gentrifying Los Angeles arts district, asking the question of how artists become complicit in the displacement of communities and how capital accelerates this ongoing tension. While LOS ANGELES: a document compiles photographs from 2014 in the arts district, Source Known (but withheld) was filmed during 2016-17 while the demolition of the Sixth Street Viaduct was beginning. The specificity of Los Angeles functions as a subtext to the narrative structure of the project, residing as a ground for the narrator's experience—a shifting landscape fraught with the outset of a changing LA. The project marks multiple endings buried between a sense of home, the dissolution of relationships, and the loss of a creative community.
A central subject of both the books and video includes a swiftly gentrifying Los Angeles arts district, asking the question of how artists become complicit in the displacement of communities and how capital accelerates this ongoing tension. While LOS ANGELES: a document compiles photographs from 2014 in the arts district, Source Known (but withheld) was filmed during 2016-17 while the demolition of the Sixth Street Viaduct was beginning. The specificity of Los Angeles functions as a subtext to the narrative structure of the project, residing as a ground for the narrator's experience—a shifting landscape fraught with the outset of a changing LA. The project marks multiple endings buried between a sense of home, the dissolution of relationships, and the loss of a creative community.
Damage Without Injury, digital images from FP-100c, publications, plywood & 2-channel HD video, 2017
An apologia, neon, 2017
Source Known (but withheld), 2-channel HD video, 8:11 min., 2017
Installation photos by Haigen G. Pearson at Icebox Project Space.