Stagnants

Stagnants features an epnoymous new series of wall-mounted sculptures based on casts of gutters and sewer drains. They extend Jacoby’s ongoing examination into forms of capture, distribution and material malfunction nested within ubiquitous interfaces. While previous works have drawn from circulatory hardware like door handles and mailboxes, Stagnants focuses on more em- bedded infrastructures: the inlets into a subterranean network of polluted flows.

Jacoby’s shell-thin fiberglass reliefs isolate the openings of invisibly linked sewer conduits found across Los Angeles, transforming their thresholds into surfaces, elevated from their depths.

They symptomize a crisis from below. When a system congests, flows reverse and flood it with what should be disappeared.

Traditional Chinese medicine asserts that if the body’s channels become polluted, their flow is clogged. To treat this, it seeks to clear circulation using a map of corresponding points which act as valves, purging its excesses. (A ringing ear is relieved by a point in the wrist, cataracts through an ankle.) Disconnected pathways of these diagnostic figures trail cross Jacoby’s works, which take their titles from individual acupuncture points that dot each of these meridians (Floating Cleft, Brain Hollow, Spasm Vessel, Veering Pas- sage). With its channels cut and its circuits extending from gutter to gutter, these acupuncture charts present anatomy in its most fungible form, a chain of numbers seeping in and out of visibility.

In Jacoby’s Assays (Clamped Stream), shards of Fordite are arranged into a figure following an acupuncture path tracing from arm to lung. Built up through sedimentary layers of enamel paint encrusted on the assembly line tracks of auto factories, Fordite is a byproduct of a process that is no longer manual, but now automat- ed and residue-free. Hobbyists found that once shaped and pol- ished, this former industrial waste could be upcycled into jewelry. These shards are jointed together by other forms of recuperated scrap such as computer connector pins and necklace chains both stripped of their gold plating. While waste typically chokes ex- change, it here ripens into further value.

Upon the floor-spanning steel grate platform, viewers pass from inlet to outlets, while being processed through the space as material coursing over a sieve.