A Matter of the Invisible

Source: The Visualist

at the National Building Art Center

2300 Falling Springs Rd, Sauget, IL 62206

Opening Saturday, September 27th, from 3PM - 6PM

On view through Friday, November 21st

Chicago-based artists, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, and Leticia Pardo, take over the two concrete sand-casting bunkers of NON STNDRD at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC), formerly the campus of the Sterling Steel Casting factory and currently, a regional repository for modernist architectural objects at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC). Engaging NBAC’s archive and collection, Hulsebos-Spofford & Pardo explore an inventory of parts, tethering the long histories of architectural relics and regional labor movements to present-day concerns of daily-wage laborers and migrant workers. Struck by building fragments cut off from circulation and defunct industrial machinery, the hauntology of NON STNDRD’s site led artists to reinscribe the laboring body on site through architectural and sculptural intervention.

A Matter of the Invisible asks what might happen if labor communities were given the same autonomy given to bodies engaged in building industrial capital or training A.I.? In an era of the mechanization of the mind, how does the site at NON STNDRD and NBAC render visible the predominance of human intelligence over machine intelligence as a social and cultural necessity?