The Sharp Edges Between Soft Fields
This exhibition documents the interface between nature and the built environment of Humboldt County. Inspired by the area’s wild beauty and extractive economic history, the pieces reckon with the material remains of timber and agricultural industries. The works feature structures situated as jewel-toned sculptures on the landscape, challenging their marginalization. Rather than overlooking these eyesores, the pieces celebrate their aesthetic qualities and ask the viewer to consider their monumentality.
The long chains of labor and capital that manifest these structures – pulled through time by the hands of those that worked each site, that built each site, and that gathered and processed the materials imported to construct each site – come to an abrupt end when the logic of capitalism no longer adds up. Severed from the economic system that produced them, these projects are left to moulder like carcasses, marked by rot, rust, and the revelation of their skeletal frames. Even those places within the series that remain in operation are pocked by overgrowth, a steady process of deformation and reclamation by the forces that waning industry sought to dominate.
Thus the corpses of industry, haunted by their departed labor and capital, are – incompletely and toxically – restored to the landscape; their rigid geometry degraded and eroded into more tender organic shapes. Although their futures are curtailed by economic ‘realities’ these structures remain open possibilities.
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” – David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules
Ben Selman is a painter and teacher from New York living on Wiyot Land.
Music by The Revelers Three
