Artist’s Statement
USA@250 Minizine Project
Year: 1860
This work approaches the year 1860 as a point of compression rather than a closed historical moment. It is a year thick with contradiction, suspended between declaration and fracture, legality and violence, growth and enclosure.
The piece exists as four double-sided organic media pages, suspended in installation. The pages are not bound. They hang, turn, and partially conceal one another, resisting a single reading order. Language is encountered in fragments, through obstruction, through growth.
Each page is constructed from living and once-living materials: moss, fiber, thread, paper, and time. The surfaces are overgrown and uneven. Text is present but not pristine. Words tangle with roots. Letters disappear and re-emerge. The materials insist on remaining active, altering how the text can be read or whether it can be read at all.
Embedded phrases such as United States, A House Divided, Fugitive Slave Law, November a Vote, Black Bodies Counted, Air Not Owned, and The War Has Not Started are drawn from the political and legal structures of 1860. They appear here as artifacts in process, neither preserved nor erased. History is treated as something unfinished and metabolizing rather than concluded.
The suspended installation form echoes both scaffold and canopy. Gravity pulls unevenly. Growth follows its own logic. The viewer must move around the work, encountering different faces, partial statements, and interrupted meanings. No single position provides the whole.
Organic media functions as method rather than metaphor. The living elements continue to change, asserting that the conditions set in 1860 were not resolved within that year or the years immediately following. They persist, altered but active.
This work holds history in suspension. It allows contradiction to remain visible. It asks viewers to stand beneath the pages, inside an unresolved structure, where language, law, and life continue to press against one another.
Link to this Organic Media: