The Fold 2003

‘You give me fever’

Steel, a material at once industrial, architectural, and automotive, dates very quickly. Whether in its pristine, raw state or in the artefacts of so many superseded modernities, it is stamped with the signs of its manufacture and its use value. It shines or rusts according to its mix or use. It takes the imprint of both its point of origin and its intended function. Then it wears out, wears away, weathers, needs replacing, resurfacing, taking its place in the narratives of time, consumption and, invariably, masculinity.

Marked by the aura of both machine and functional object, it nonetheless still implies metal, oil and their transformation. Steel is alchemical and thus the repository of a nostalgia, of a certain inbuilt obsolescence, of a certain style. In this case the visual rhetoric of cars, consumption and money. These panels – petrol station signage – have a kind of history, beginning in industrial processes, and generating a certain cultural currency, a semiotic charge. In turn the rhetoric of unleaded, super, $, most credit cards implies spatial metaphors, and the logic of transaction and transition. Perhaps the petrol station is not unlike the mall or the airport, interstitial, geographically specific but culturally general, ubiquitous.

A double-sided assemblage, they are re-marked: targets, tin men, toy soldiers, money and oil, Americana and automobiles, minimalist visual rhetoric, and signatures for abstraction, op and pop, the painterly gesture as impersonal and generalized (self) portrait, echoes of the grid, the mark as bodily habit, reflex, intuition. This material and significatory cascade creates a tear in social conventions, puts the viewer in my place, challenges the assumption of mastery and epistemological surety, and by implication, the subject/object relation: that’s archive fever.