TEXT:

Reflexively engaging the physical and institutional conditions of 1708, Infrapolitics explores the systems through which power, in its literal and symbolic form, is distributed across spatial, social, and economic networks. Working with raw materials of the urban landscape—metal, glass, and electric light—Ruiz’s approach points to a complex mapping of the space between the aesthetic and political dimensions of the globalized built environment, probing a reconsideration of its supposed neutral infrastructures which are often kept out of view.

The work at 1708 begins with the physical site of the gallery, and draws outwards towards broader infrastructures of city planning, construction, and the homogenization of architectural environments. Working from research into the history of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike, and its use to both connect and divide the city along socio-economic and racial lines, Infrapolitics asks how art might be used against its more recent tendency to serve as a lubricant for forms of “soft” gentrification and economic development.

Infrapolitics is comprised of a central intervention, Western Standards K80X4, that reroutes conduits from the basement up through air vents in the gallery’s floor. As sculptural elements, the electrical conduits that both power 1708 as well a group of LED safety lamps, these materials shift from merely passive objects to highlight the active social and political implications of infrastructure itself. Retaining their functional properties, these sculptural forms are in service to systems of circulation and are informed by the material geometry of such networks. In this way Ruiz looks to diagrammatic documents from the Valentine Museum archive that depict the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike construction.

Western Standards-LV1-4, are stainless-steel sculptures that have replaced 4 air vents in the gallery floor. Visually indicative of actual air vents, Ruiz designed these works with parametric software often used in real estate driven architecture. These works partially expose the basement of 1708—an unseen site of the institution’s functionality. Western Standards (Enclosures 1-12), a series of wall mounted units, is constructed of the seemingly benign glass used in commercial and corporate construction, a ubiquitous illusion of transparency that simultaneously mediates the boundary between access and exclusion, and designates places of class labor, hierarchy, and mobility.

Additionally, for Infrapolitics Ruiz has changed the institutional protocol for supporting and paying artists—requiring 1708 to become certified by W.A.G.E (Working Artists for the Greater Economy), an organization which sets minimum payment standards for cultural institutions based on their overall operating budget. 1708 joins a larger network of cultural organizations that understand the necessity to make an infrastructural change in how artistic and creative labor is supported and sustained. As Ruiz has written, “form is far from an inert and neutral container but a highly charged political and ideological field.” Infrapolitics extends this notion in that the network through which something as prevalent as electricity is distributed is considered as anything but inactive. Rather networks and infrastructures are an index of the contingent and highly charged ways the built environment reflects and reproduces social hierarchies while also presenting the political potential for modes of indirect action.

This exhibition is made possible in part by Bagby Electric, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and La Diff. 

PROGRAM:

Summer Sessions: Built Environment, presented by ICA VCU
Friday June, 28, 2019 at 1708 Gallery
Participant (text by Alan Ruiz, delivered by Park Myers)

PRESS:

Alan Ruiz: Infrapolitics, ART PAPERS, 2019
Alan Ruiz, “Infrapolitics” at 1708 Gallery, Lucid, 2019
Alan Ruiz’s Multi-Faceted “Infrapolitics” Exhibition, Cool Hunting, 2019
Review: “Infrapolitics” by Alan Ruiz at 1708 Gallery, Style Weekly, 2019