Overview
Wildcatter sink was our closing exhibition we did just before I moved to San Francisco, in 2021. By this time we had vacated our space in West town, and I thought it would be fun to curate and program a cement finished hole I found in my backyard. We lit it with LEDs and invited two artists to participate - Em Davenport and Faysal Altanbozar. We wanted to make something animalistic - to suggest a creature had been occupying the hole. Faysal had been making these really incredible bird feeders at the time, so we situated his beautiful hand-welded gatorade bottle feeder above the pit, to nourish this imagined creature. Inside, the remains (by Em): a series of 30 or so plaster-casted bones printed with a plaid pattern using a technique race car drivers use to put custom decals on their helmets.
Weeks later we found out from our landlord that the hole was actually part of a very old sewage system… after climbing into, around, and out of the hole for weeks.
Press Release
Derrickman J.E (wildcatter turned roughneck) clocks in at the oil rig; brown bag, lunch in hand. Locker room: bodies weathered by their station. A small pendant of a newborn carved in Myrrh hangs from his neck. A tingling discomfort lingers in his throat. Off he goes to the steaming pipes where his hand will expertly guide the pump. The operation begins. The gurgling pipes eat up the ocean floor. Underwater: a sudden current drags an enormous conch shell – at great speed – towards the main pump. Blocked now, the once inert machine twists like a wounded animal; dinosaur slurry animating its contortions. With all its parts now alive Derrickman J.E reluctantly accepts his fate. An oily hose lifts him by the neck, constricting his carotid while a serendipitous drop of crude flies downward towards his gaping mouth. Gasping for air, but in doing so, inhaling the bitterest ambrosia. After the commotion, his body is limp, poisoned but not strangled.
Faysal’s work is a sharp assessment of industrial permanence, a written word in a providing chain, now able – as it stands erected – to hold, to even provide us with a sweet serum of Health that extends this moment of asphyxia a bit longer or forever. Or is it a gaping wound we are licking? A dripping nourishment of time on display. Immunizes but also anesthetizes.
Em’s, an event of affective intuition, both carcass and butcher (a skinning knife with fur handle) in metaphorical one, two liners that are always enough for you needn’t write much for a potent haiku. how much honey can i eat? is far from passively feeding from this arrangement or standing in the rain as it is a great spirit that contains, like architecture itself. For it too must be scattered somewhere. And we too will find it ruined in (due) time.
Both in existence here, in the ghostly presence of an absent animal.
New Works is proud to present Wildcatter sink. A two-person exhibition featuring new work by Faysal Altunbozar and Em Marie Davenport.Weeks later we found out from our landlord that the hole was actually part of a very old sewage system… after climbing into, around, and out of the hole for weeks.
