SEMANTIC DRIFT: David L. Johnson and Fields Harrington

The room looks empty and well it should, we’ve emptied it out, removed the loose signifiers, the misleading flourishes of expressivity, and the garish color of mystic systems. To occupy space is after all a political act and we’re not going anywhere once you’ve invited us in.  We’ll pierce the walls like infrastructure, mixing our DNA into the fabric of the space, we’ll create recombinant hybrid structures that barricade the doors and manifest a barbed perimeter. We’ll make ruthless and contaminated things, as they are, in their actuality, anchored against semantic drift.

fields harrington and David L. Johnson make dispassionate work with a relentless clear minded logic that allows it to circumvent the tyranny of aesthetic discourse.  Things as they are; non-metaphorical specific artifacts severed from an existing social, economic, scientific, or structural context.  The specificity of the objects is so critical that we wonder if the system they were pulled from now has a hole in it, a structural flaw, a point where the whole enterprise might fail or collapse.

-David Hartt, September 2023