Bartow + Metzgar explores the relationship of things in the world with regard to affect, movement, and intensity. Largely embedded with considerations of what we would call "minority architecture", our installation is used as a mechanism for simultaneously creating and disrupting space. Images and objects are considered as having equal agency with regard to their potential as new forms of invention. In short, Bartow + Metzgar is interested in the question of what is it to rethink structure as agency, or as something other than utility driven.
Our installation work is positioned within a number of different notions about architecture, philosophy, and art. This work operates as a plane of activity that unfolds and reterritorializes the conventional space of the gallery. It could be thought of as an assemblage exploring the potential of architecture and the leakages it inherently provides.
The space the assemblage resides in is an unregulated space where contradictions and infectious ruptures are located; it is a space of indeterminate rules. As an assemblage of disparate relations it is inherently embedded with voids and interstices where lines of leakage are located and explored. This assemblage by its very nature is complex and in its complexity carries with it the potential for things to become something else, always in a state of immanence; a brightly colored truss structure becomes an image storage rack that links to a shipping crate that operates as a vinyl siding-image receptor. In other parts of the assemblage you find ferric chloride drawings operating as planer shifts seeking their own trajectory from another plane of directionality, all of this elevated from the floor with parts reconfigured from an old piano.
The investigation of slippage is central to our practice and is made manifest through painted/photo screenprint and video images from architectural references, consumer society, and diagrams. A score (set of directives) is used as an alternate model to move through urban-suburban-rural-and other locales (the world) to collect images for our archive. These images join together into the assemblage, not as photos or paintings, but as images reacting with other images. In it, they become two-dimensional manifestations that offer another reading of space, one that is flat, at times linear, nonrepresentational, and ultimately contradictory to the physical space of the assemblage.
Additionally, audio tracks of various recordings (the whining of a contractor's saw, a jogger's footsteps, a business lunch meeting, the soundtrack of a movie outside a theatre, and other events) have been compiled and looped on four compact CD players. Audio is offered as a trajectory of sound crossing over, into, and out of the territory of the assemblage, thereby adding an aural dimension to the experience of space. Consequently, the assemblage establishes different levels of intensity and movement that are important notions in our work that contribute to the installation's spatial identity. Each movement made with and within this assemblage of object-sound-image involves an immanent trajectory, where acts of collusion, betrayal, infection, contradiction, and denial are inherently part of a reterritorialization process. What is that territory that lies between space and the body and how might this affect the manner in which we experience it? It is in the process of creating this assemblage that we hope to reveal what may be one of many iterations of this space between, this territory where leakages occur.
Spurse
Spurse is an international art/architectural collective dedicated to experimentation with the active agency of the urban milieu (Canada, USA, Germany, Italy, Mexico, India, Finland, Great Britain ….).
Spurse is an organization that has no (fixed) content or members -- it is rather a viral multiplicity that is continuously reforming itself as it becomes new projects and new events. Spurse is open to change, contradiction, multiplicity, inversions, tangents, hybrids, illness, infection, betrayal -- spurse is an affirmation of, and experimentation with, the unknowable becoming of the giveness of reality.
Spurse is the art of looking, where looking is broadly, but specifically defined as an active engagement with environmental movements -- as we are looking we act and are thus consequently part of our looking as well as in excess of it.
