turning the heap

turning the heap explores the work of artists whose use of archives interrogates the way institutions operate. This exhibition marks the second year of The Lab’s three-year series the compost pile, exploring the interdependent nature of artistic ecosystems.

Marissa Benedict and David Reuter’s pair of works Family Sculpt and The Natural History of an Interview take their names from a branch of family therapy practices that are influenced by cybernetic theories developed by Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir, and others in the Palo Alto Group. Benedict and Reuter extract elements of archival interviews from the landmark “Doris” therapy session, and recontextualize Satir’s practices of embodied family relationships through collaborations with arts institutions with which they have worked.

Weston Olencki’s thresholding focuses on a single vestigial door in The Lab’s building, the exterior of which was demolished after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Using seismographic data from the earthquake and transposed nodal points of the Earth’s atmosphere, Olencki views this earthquake as “but a click, an impulse, reverberated out through the earth’s crust,” transforming it into a three-month resonance in an empty setting of The Lab’s theater space. The geological record of the earthquake is stretched over months in The Lab’s space.

Manfred Werder’s current practice of writing, performance, and installation is concerned with the written history of the colonial expansion of the Western United States, and specifically the engagement between Manifest Destiny and technology as the two are related in the written record of colonialism. His new work takes shape in a series of performances at The Lab from March through June.