Saar Shemesh

Please describe the project(s) you executed during your RAIR residency. Did you make what you had planned to? Why or why not? 

My project morphed multiple times before the residency started, and even once I was at RAIR… I had a grand idea that relied heavily on finding a large amount of very specific items…which I quickly realized was hard to go after unless you weren’t intending it. From the beginning however, I knew I wanted to make work in response to the former Metalbank superfund site, which Revolution Recovery had acquired some years before. My initial proposal would have ideally consisted of flexible and rigid tubing, pipe, ductwork, hoses, etc. and although these items do come through the waste stream, they are often pretty worn out by the time they do, which would have made it difficult to use them the way I intended to. Then I wanted to create an earthwork, but in order to do it at the scale I wanted to do it at, we would have had to get the EPA involved because you can’t bring in, nor displace any soil on the former Metalbank site. All of this was floating around BEFORE I got to RAIR, because things got delayed with the pandemic and I had an extra year to chew through concepts with Billy and see what might be possible.

Once I arrived, I went on a site tour with Billy and anything I thought I might do went completely out the door, in the best possible way. Before collecting anything, I observed. We’d go out in the morning, the afternoon, and once the workday had ended and the tipping floor was quiet. I would take mental stock of the excavators, forklifts, dumptrucks, and contractor's pickups, noting who we saw yesterday, who we saw twice in one day. While observing the excavator and truck drivers, I was struck by the graceful choreography of this well-oiled machine. Each operator or driver knew where the other was at any given time, and while running around in high-vis, they knew where I was too, even as a new addition to the choreography and a definite wrench in what is otherwise a flawless dance. Being privy to the dance, but not a member of the troupe, made me think about keeping time (in a musical or movement sense), disrupting time (interrupting labor, offering play, suggesting rest), and the ways I both mark, and experience time being marked in the environments I travel through. I thought about hearing bells, alarms, sirens, and after seeing the helium and freon canisters, I pursued the two series of bells. 

Describe your process of navigating the waste piles -- e.g. Did you approach the yard in search of specific objects? If not, how did you decide what to collect? 

At first it was complete-overwhelm – in a good sense. The first week, if I tried to look for specific things, I’d never ‘find’ them, but my eyes weren’t trained yet. I’d be out there with Billy, and he’d just see the tiniest corner of something, or look at the way a trash bag was leaning and he’d have a good idea of what was inside. He could (and can) tell the contents just by observing the bag’s gravitational gesture, it’s incredibly keen. In 4 weeks time, there’s no way to cultivate that kind of eye, but I did get better at discerning what to pursue and what to move on from. Once I stopped trying to search for items I thought I wanted, I began to find things that I would actually use in the sculptures I created. Almost like my dogged pursuit was the obstacle that hindered finding anything ultimately useful.. One evening after the excavators had powered down for the day and the dust settled on the tipping floor, I was walking around the outside of the sorting warehouse trying to get a closer look at one of the cats who climbed around in the metal scrap heap. There was a small cluster of bright red helium tanks and faded pink freon canisters, both of them squat and shaped like pill-capsules. Perhaps it was the cat that led me to them, or the burst of color amidst dusty concrete and twisted steel fragments, but it was that moment I decided to abandon the things I had collected previously and focus on these canisters. After that, everything I pulled was in service of these containers, whether it was hardware to hang them or bits and pieces to make clanging elements out of.

How does the work you produced during this residency fit into (or differ from) your body of work in general? 

At first I thought my time at RAIR was somewhat of an anomaly in my practice –I don’t generally work with found objects or readymades so the residency was an exciting challenge – but I realize now that the work I made dovetails with many of my past works. The untuned sonics, rounded geometric forms, intentionally imperfect multiples, even the color palette (which I did not apply, just worked with the inherent color of items), all have homes in other projects. Conceptually too, the bells meditate on labor, disruption, rest, communication, play, cycles, illness, and time; all themes I have been working with for some time now. 

Do issues of sustainability explicitly or implicitly manifest in the work you produced during the residency?

It’s impossible not to think about the sustainability of being an artist, making new work out of old things, while 50-100 trucks dump several hundred tons of waste and recycling outside your workspace every day, but I don’t think that the work I made is making any sort of statement on sustainability. If anything, the sustainability I was thinking about had less to do with environmentalism and more to do with sustaining life as a person, thinking about how a day might be structured if not around labor but on play or rest. 

Please describe how this residency may or may not have changed your perception of the waste stream. 

I have spent most of my life in New York City so I thought I was pretty aware of how wasteful people can be, but the scale of what I encountered at RAIR was undeterminable. The number of tons of waste, the damage of layers upon layers of particulates on the giant machinery, and the people-power that makes any of it possible, left a grave impression on me. 

In what ways (if any) will the RAIR residency continue to influence your studio practice? 

Honestly, I haven’t looked at ‘trash’ the same way since my residency at RAIR. I’ve always been a bit of a dumpster-diver, but it didn’t ever enter my studio practice – just my domestic spaces. My time at RAIR sharpened my eye for found objects, which I am incorporating into some of my form-building at the moment. As a sculptor, the practise that makes my heart sing more than anything else is mold-making (not even the casting part, ironically), so lately I’ve been searching junk yards for objects that I can build off of and obscure. 

Do you plan to exhibit the work created at RAIR elsewhere? If so, in what context  do you see the work existing?

The work I made at RAIR was as much site-reactive as it was site-specific – in that materially the work is a response to the trash piles it comes from and that the two series of bells I created were installed in particular and significant locations on the Metalbank Superfund site. That being said, I’m going to be sharing an iteration of the bells in a group show at Artlot in Brooklyn this summer. This iteration will include a sound piece - a mix of field recordings I made of each of the bells being rung, in the barn and on the berm, and their ambient environments. I’m excited to share the work at Artlot, in part because of its proximity to the Gowanus Canal, another famed superfund site. Something about linking these two superfunds via sculpture and sound, feels potent and charged. Letting the peal of untuned bells linger with the air and the street…TBD…