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"Order is the cultural taxonomy of the world.  I use parts of given sets and systems to recompose new wholes.  I accumulate and itemize song titles, monuments, buildings, and things to decipher patterns and codes of unthought of possibilities in the blindspot of existing orders. 

My work is an imagination of the real. 

THE ORDER OF THINGS

 

My work on architecture, artifacts and anthropogenic materials (human effects on the environment) is a trilogy on the order of things.  Order is the space of where knowledge is constituted with conditions of possibility determined by what history will allow in its orders.  My process begins with categories and an itemization of content: monuments, buildings, and things.  I make and collect lists, photographs, and sample material into sets and archives to decipher codes of culture in descriptive systems, structures, spaces, and objects.  My work of creating taxonomies from things that exist is to expose hidden myths within a given system.  I create new orders to reinsert excluded differences and make sculptures that retool reality for its reimagination.  

 

A major influence is Michel Foucault’s work on The Order of Things, which presented knowledge as subject to change in time and set new conditions of possibility at present.  It inspired me to think of reality as an unfinished project and with older works on architecture, critiqued how history, the law, and class structures are written on the physical environment.  Architectures of Defense are fence monuments composed to demonstrate how the demarcation of spaces reveal class and power through property.  In a solo exhibition titled On the Wrong Side of History presented at the Brooklyn Museum, I wanted to break with the classification of history in the museum separated by time and place paired contemporary sculptures with ancient artifacts in a series titled Sculptural Combines.  I learned how to make art like an Egyptian by studying every single item in the museum’s collection and selecting artifacts to respond with different types of resemblances; making art through emulation, sympathy, antipathy, and analogy.  

 

These two projects on architecture and artifacts now leads me to the subject of the anthropocene, the planetary epoch when human activity has the greatest impact on geological and ecological systems.  In the time of climate change the concept of order needs revision as new evidence alter our knowledge of the natural world.  New works titled Future Fossils reverberate the discovery of a new geological category of rock called, plasti conglomerates, organic coral and lava melding with plastic waste.  Future Fossils  are sculptures made with found everyday objects about the obsolescence and life span of objects.  As nature makes artifacts of human culture, we can no longer treat nature as an standing reserve of materials.  The difference with my new new body of works is that it begins at an earlier point, making raw materials out of our cultural excesses and ethically change the process to include cleaning the environment by harvesting plastic waste to make the work.  My sculptures are meant to be evidence of the very things we deny, artworks that give visibility to the nature of our condition.

Shift in the order of things

PART 1

ARCHITECTURE

Sculptures, prints and drawings on the demarcations of space and how class antagonism is written  in the built environment.

PART 2

ARTIFACTS

A series of sculptural combines and drawings interrupting museum order that fix cultures in the past tense.

PART 3

ANTROPOGENIC MATTER

Sculptures on the co-constitution of containers to the contained, placing human culture as one thing in a larger planet.    

PART 1: ARCHITECTURE

Shift in the Order of Things trilogy begins with Architecture and the built environment where rules, norms and systems are materially realized, codifying and establishing social behavior and subjectivity.

PART 2: ARtifacts

Sculptural Combines is a body of work that disrupts chronology and regionality as cultural framing of museum classification and display.  Tuazon returns to an order of things grouped by theme, function and relationship of forms based on human patterns of producing meaning.

PART 3: ANTHROPOGENIC MATTER

The most current project on order is consolidation of nature and culture.  Nature, once delegated to the background of human culture, moves into the foreground  of our survival.  This body of work on the interdependency of spaces telescope from micro to macro environments to connect all spaces to the womb and planet.

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