In the Hills: Placing the Ruin in the Rust Belt and Appalachia

Abstract

My work highlights how industrial ruins and the objects they contain exert autonomy and re-form their identities through their abandonment. In it, I draw from archival research to produce forged sculptural artifacts informed by historic industrial tools. My exhibition saw these tools compose themselves together, growing into new constructs among broken worktables and scattered papers. Discarded together, the artifacts reconstruct themselves, emulate the forms of their environment and integrate into the landscape, their original purposes overwritten. The artifacts— parallel to the ruins which contain them— negotiate new utilities for themselves along the parameters of their new environment until, eventually, their identity is divorced entirely from the industry which produced them.

My work focuses primarily on philosophies of architecture, labor, and representation from the industrial era (ca. 1890-1930), especially as they interact with contemporaneous art movements and emergent political polarity. Exploring from a Marxist perspective I seek to understand both why the new structures of accelerating capitalism posed to them a fundamental crisis for the understanding of architecture and of temporality, why industrial architecture threatened the death of the ruin, and why (sitting at the other end of a century or so) I disagree. In service of this, I reconcile contemporary philosophy with that of the industrial era, looking to recent, direct outgrowths of the work of Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács. I also look to the emergent colloquial philosophies that drove a reaction to industry in the communities which were affected. I look to the traditions and mechanisms by which those communities organized and survived in the aftermath of the abuses and abandonment of industrialization. Out of the multifaceted and evolving understandings of industrial structures, as they were built and as they sit abandoned, I work to construct an image of these sites which navigates their internal life as they become ruins. All of this to produce a body of work in steel, wood, and paper which carefully describes my own experience of the industrial ruin as an identifier of place and as an allegory of regional history and character.

The installed exhibition challenges the audience to engage with the artifacts, interrogate the continuities between them and to understand how they may have functioned. The artifacts construct an image of the ruin, not as it was in service of capital, but as it has been overgrown since its abandonment by capital, irreducible now to its former utility. The ruins, too, come to fill a different role both for the people who live alongside them and for the environment they occupy. They serve, for me, as an allegory through which to explore the nuanced and changing process of belonging and relating to a landscape which is so tied to industry and its repercussions.