Phones are Heavy leans into the notion and sentiment of heaviness, in terms of material weight, extraction, archive, and affect, especially of our communication technologies and the tensions of this relationship. Our phones are heavy in what they hold and what they reflect, how they weigh us down, tethered by coarse strings of gratification and desire. And by what we see, scrolling traumatic valleys of news and crises flattened by the screen. These metal boxes that emanate stale blue light, option our behavior and experiences as financial futures to the data broker’s highest bidder. They micro-target ads fueling our assigned projects of sterilized “self-optimization”. And these phones are so fetishized that we forget how they are made - the mines extracted, the labor exhausted.
Phones are Heavy is comprised of 9 artists: Flora Wilds, Masha Keryan, Hannah Rust, dani lopez, Amanda Sandlin, Ana González Barragán, Isabelle Higgins, Maya Buffett-Davis and Kai Bee, working in media unmediated by the screen: textile, sculpture, ceramic, painting and drawing. Their works contemplate this feeling of heaviness, literally and abstractly - materially and representationally. González Barragán’s sculptures use found objects from marble and obsidian mines that reference the material process of deep extraction and penetration. Wilds also employs reuse as medium - from the detritus of packing boxes and construction site vestiges to Y2k high-heels previously worn. Her work addresses the compulsions of consumption, and anxieties specific to digital life. Every second is a memory watched. She plays with her concept of “nostalgia salience”; this cultural phenomenon and psychoanalytic tic of knowing our present is perpetually tarnished with the awareness that we will soon occupy a future plagued with longing for this current moment. dani lopez’s work reflects the weight and heaviness of a buried gay secret and the consequences of this secret disclosed.
Sandlin also dives into affect; her neon chartreuse tears of sadness beam densely from delicate ceramics. These tears are another appendage, foisted upon the ever growing condition that is the constancy of a depressive hedonia and survival mode. Higgins also calls to these appendages, azure blue wails on the reception of a heavy call. Or perhaps, the solace of an empathetic ear. lopez also marinates in the reprieve of interdependence and Keryan’s marks stress this importance of entanglement. She wields hefty paint, masterfully sculpting the haptics of hyper-real flesh that you can feel and hear - holding and unholding. These feet dispossessed from the body reference both the height of living - entangled intimacies of lovers sleeping, entwining, dancing and when ultimately, grievously still. Bee’s painting also underscores the warmth of in-between moments, a long embrace. We crave this kind of embodied closeness in our atomized universe, fenced in by screens.
The works in Phones are Heavy contemplate the somatics of heaviness. There are significant objects of mass in association and explicit physicality - concrete, ceramic, obsidian, steel, diamond wire and floor-to-ceiling plastic. And points of tension, tightly woven threads, glass suspended by the spike of a stiletto wedged under a valley of fake grass, fabric fraying from the weight of affect. Like Lauren Berlant, this shows views affect as a “site of potential elucidation…in how it registers the conditions of life…” Our lives are heavy. But who is creating these weights? Our boulders are often constructed. When we interrogate heaviness, we interrogate power. And how to better bear these weights.
This exhibition also tends to what makes us transcend this heaviness; the lightness of connection, intimacy and the possibility of new ways of being and seeing. Buffet-Davis’s interactive ceramic sculptures embrace the kind of sentiment a robot cannot compute, uncertainty. And her “wheel of answers for the world” provokes us to still spin for another option, maybe a better option. Rust’s graphite drawing also pushes us to shine light in the dark cracks; will there be butterflies over there? The labor of exploration signified in drops of sweat, the cousins of tears. We are being told that the future is dystopia, but what happened to dreaming of better - what happened to yearning for Utopia?