a breeze, for you
Solo Exhibition at the Vault Gallery (Victoria, BC)
May 24-June 9, 2024
Breeze blocks are decorative cement building bricks. You can find them stacked precariously outside of houses, creating partitions between the sidewalk and a parking lot, or perhaps as a stand-alone wall. They were designed as structural partitions that provided privacy, while allowing airflow and sunlight to leak through. There is a common design that resembles the geometric right angles of a camera’s viewfinder, or increasingly ornamental compositions that cast intricate shadows. Last autumn, I began collecting wayward blocks in my neighbourhood. I was drawn to how they shaped my vision, how the negative spaces carved out slices of blue sky, and how I could catch someone’s eye through moss-lined craters. Around this time, I listened to curator and writer Legacy Russell describe the digital as an architecture, a space where massive corporations aim to control our “viewfinders.” Like the breeze block, algorithms frame what we see, simultaneously revealing and redacting information. Yet, both physical and digital structures can be torn down or defied, used in ways they were not intended to be.
a breeze, for you explores the architectures of power—including algorithms, language, and built environments—that shape our experiences of the world. Using the ‘breeze block’ as a point of departure, the installation wields objects that are ornamental, speculative, porous, and reflective to consider our relationships to built spaces. By drawing attention to, simulating, and disrupting everyday materials, a breeze for you creates an offscreen world that blurs the boundaries between digital and physical. It asks, by becoming a breeze, what structures might we slip through, refuse, collapse?
