Sculptures by Sophie Lev: I Don't Believe in Erosion Control
January 23- February 1, 2020
In these works, rocks, sand, and erosion act as metaphors for the undoing and remaking of assemblages. The story of rocks is one of constant shape-shifting, whether through processes of wind/weather, or through the extraction and fabrication of minerals into commodities used as the building blocks of the every-day, of capital. I am thinking about rocks, also, as witness. The stone and sand of Santa Cruz are witness to a long history of mining, displacement, erosion, of collapsing inward towards the earth. Rock knows the history of erasure and indigenous genocide on this land. It has been mined, turned into gravel, cement, concrete, plaster, mortar and more. Its history is one deeply embroiled in the development of this region, the San Francisco Bay Area. We are always already in relation with it, as a physical substance and a metaphor of the multiplicity of entanglements which constitute the concept of a “self.”
I am thinking about erosion as a process of boundary blurring. Erosion is about the past becoming present, and latent possibilities of connectivity. Erosion is both a symbol of the very literal erosion of bonds between species at the hand of petrocapitalism and it is an insistence upon an iterative notion of selfhood. As rocks erode, their collectivity is made even more visible: existing as compounds of minerals and chemicals, the release of small particles moves throughout the strata of nature/culture to link all bodies, perceptibly and imperceptibly, in a process of collaborative self-making.
I have highlighted sand in these works as a way to think about the poetics and political potential of eroded matter. Retained by nylon, the sand’s ephemerality becomes mass. These sculptures are animated by wind, breath, light, and the accumulation of small particles trying to seep through pores. They direct us to an enlivened collectivity, a subjecthood that breaks boundaries, resists individuation, trespasses, and celebrates the “trouble” of our eroding selves (Haraway).
I am interested in the material of a screen as both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it is the fine mesh material used to separate inside from outside, through which light and sun and dust can move but neighborhood cats are barred from entry. It is construction mesh put over cliff sides to prevent them from falling onto highways. It is a seive which separates particles based on size. The screen is also the plane onto which images are projected or diseminated, the device responsible for facilitating a specific social relation of visual access to, yet alienation from, place. As a verb, to screen is the process of filtration, of separating based on difference. It is a border, rather than a membrane.
I attend to disproportionate scale to animate the movement of tangible particles across the screen, and insist that it is not only ephemeral matter which defies filtration, or separation. The screen would like us to believe it is doing its job, by filtering, separating, screening matter. These works ask you to think otherwise.
When the grid of control bends, the ghosts of possibility make themselves known. Their contours and shadows reveal the specter and beauty of corporeal morphism. To be attuned to this geography of self is to understand entanglement as the starting place of all being and becoming, not an anomaly to it.
I am invested in an embodied, enlivened porousness. I am attentive to the permeability of borders, and the materials that get through the cracks. I am interested in foiling the illusion of separation, in making the metaphors of collectivity visual.
Down with all borders
And until then,
Becoming the fluid forms which seep through and make them obsolete.
Please activate these sculptures with your breath.