C. Klockner

Brick Ethic
April 25-June 7, 2025 at lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA

“How could Ovid claim that a being that has changed form—a human who has become a stone, or a god who has turned into a bird—is still the same thing and must therefore be called by the same name? The time someone spent living as a flower and the time that same someone spent living as a woman are part of the same fate, and make sense within the horizon of that fate. That, apparently, is exactly the meaning of the principle or the concept of the narrative in general: building a relation, and indeed a relation that can even take the form of identity, between two completely different things.

The stone and the woman are the same. It is tempting to assume that there is an eternal soul here, a spiritual object that exists beyond all objects and survives all forms. Yet we may also say that narrative is the name of a mode of continuity that permits the building of interconnections between dissimilar things, to the point where they are translated into, and identified with, each other. The entity in the narrative is composed of the narrated relations and is nothing outside these interconnections. And the latter survive even the translation, at which point two relations coincide. Not a single molecule remains when a woman is turned to stone, but her relation to her lover, her enemy, and the jealous goddess to whom she owes her metamorphosis persist through transformation. The relation survives thingness and personhood; it transposes both into the same world of possibilities.”

-Diedrich Diederichsen on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 2012

girl system 01 (Efficient Home Laptop Notebook Computer Desk with Square Shelves, Black/Grey)
2024-25
desk, white brass, SLA printed resin

romance 01
2024
burnt carpet on panel

untitled
2025
modified tool cases, modified gun case, modified pelican case, aluminum, white brass

untitled (true love)
2024
steel, 1998 first aid kit, PLA printed plastic, jewelers wax

girl system 01 (Efficient Home Laptop Notebook Computer Desk with Square Shelves, Black/Grey)
2024-25
desk, white brass, SLA printed resin

null dialogue
2025
at in practice, sculpturecenter, new york city, ny
Modified subwoofers, amplifier, construction fill, mild steel, fog machine, jeweler’s wax, cardboard, and motion-triggered stereo audio. 8:24 mins (two movements, 7:20 and 1:04 mins).
Dimensions variable.

Audio description: The work alternatingly plays one of two movements on an audience’s entrance and exit (by way of a motion trigger in the gallery entrance), one with a runtime of 7m04s and the other with a runtime of 1m20s. Across both movements, an undisclosed conversation between lovers plays through two subwoofers, whose cabinets have each been modified with custom mesh steel faces and steel coverings over the handles.

In the first movement, the conversation is muffled, heard as if from behind drywall, as if through floorboards, as if through soil. As is standard with subwoofers, the signal cuts off above 122hz so that articulation becomes inaudible; the voice becomes, instead, haptic. Two minutes in, the sonic space shudders and warps into an inversion: the conversation is transposed into a MIDI kickdrum, and inverts once more. A rising drone eventually builds into a wall of sound, breaking against dissonant harmonics and draping each voice in phase interference. A vocal chop spasms and breaks before the voices reemerge, once again merely muffled.

In the second movement, the conversation plays in kickdrum MIDI, counterposing a repetitive dotted eighth sub-bass rhythm.

Each three minutes, a puff of fog emerges from an adjacent machine.

Untitled
Plastic mouth retractor, wood filler, 935 silver
Dimensions variable

Shepard tone
PLA, wood filler
1 x 33 x 1 inches (3 x 84 x 3 cm)

Archive: 2025

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