ALEC SNOW

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Using materials that transition in state upon their use and application, I explore the process of making as something perpetual with potentially fixed consequences.

Plaster moves from powder to liquid to solid. With its heating, expansion, and subsequent shrinkage, the material undergoes exhausting shifts as it moves towards desired outcomes. Wood is subjected to insurmountable heat, becoming charcoal; whose compression is undone as it is extended across a two-dimensional plane.

Making is a jostling of materials, keeping them in constant motion until they reach a point of balance, entering a satiating stasis. My practice is currently defined by employing these transitory materials to create forms that evoke a similar sense of coming into being. Some forms oscillate and sway, forced into movement by thin stocks commissioned with the task of holding their own shape. Others appear bulbous and undulating, teetering with the illusion of expansion and growth. Ever present is a sense of collapse, a material decay, one that will take place not only aesthetically but physically as well.

When used in the making process, materials are granted an air of permanence. I suggest, in the potential contained within these materials and the transitions, they undergo in the making process, that whatever permanence we grant them will eventually become undone. Materials can only perform a perennial sense; eventually, the performance is fretted by experiences of transition, expansion, decay, and collapse. These experiences take place beyond the art object; they occur in another location, just adjacent to the one I am constructing in the body.