Debugging the Earth
Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery
at St. John’s University
8000 Utopia Parkway
Jamaica, New York
2/5/26– 3/22/26
Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery
at St. John’s University
8000 Utopia Parkway
Jamaica, New York
2/5/26– 3/22/26
When confronting a manufactured good, reverse engineering is a way to understand and reproduce the product when its creator’s designs are hidden or unknown. Reverse engineering can be used for the maintenance of market relations: from debugging legacy software to ensure interoperability, to checking products for possible patent infringements by rivals. It can also serve liberatory aims: from reproducing lifesaving drugs that are under pharmaceutical patent to the improvisational production of needed goods under sanctions or structural underdevelopment. In both cases, reverse engineering is a way to reveal the creator’s ideological priors—their assumptions and orientation to their world and its inhabitants.
Throughout the exhibition, manufactured goods appear both as support structures and as ready-made art objects. In Mandel’s Mall Pretzel, a hand-sculpted cast bronze pretzel dangles pendant-like from a bathroom stall grab bar hung at the ADA compliant height of 33 inches from the ground—pointing to the role of the civil engineer/interior architect as the negotiator between the vulnerabilities and vicissitudes of the human body and the standardized built environment. Magaña’s security drawer works are painstaking replicas of the internal drawers of safety deposit boxes. Removed from the enclosures of imagined financial institutions, the drawers are affixed to the wall—unsecuritized and unprotected—as empty vessels of use and exchange value.
Further within the exhibition, manufactured goods appear in various stages of production: a CVS branded medical bracelet hand rendered in ceramic, at an apparent prototype stage; Leaktite 2 gallon buckets made from hand blown glass, recalling an older technologic stage of manufacturing prior to plastic injection molding; a Bioré mask, over-engineered in rigid corrugated aluminum.
For Telford Keogh, moving forward and backwards within the production process includes the deep time of geology and fossil fuels—tracing the manufactured goods to their commodity constituencies. Telford Keogh’s CNC routed pink and green Karachi onyx sculpture acts as a secular reliquary for Vaseline—a refined petroleum byproduct once referred to as "rod wax," the black, sticky substance that would clog oil drilling equipment—itself an accretion of geologic pressures.
Irving’s sculptures employ a sedimentary logic: accruing ceramic shapes that take the form of shards, rubble, asphalt and archaic infrastructure. These backfilled compositions also contain shocks of hypercurrent detritus—ID card, newspaper clipping, cigarette carton—counterposing the deep time of the clay body with the ultra-contemporary cultural debris it depicts. The viewer approaches Irving’s sculptures as one would a brightly colored cube of crushed automobiles—as an impacted survey of the American material hardscape, a living core sample containing the still life aspect of a perfectly preserved ham sandwich in the anaerobic environment of a landfill.
Within Debugging the Earth, manufactured and commodity goods occupy shifting positions along the waste stream: Telford Keogh’s tablecloths retrieved from landfills; Magaña’s recontextualized maintenance boxes manufactured to capture and dispose of excess printer ink; Chang’s use of studio debris such as foam packaging and discarded materials from her fabrication business.
When reverse engineering is applied to the non-human world, problems instantly arise—how to disassemble an object for study that isn’t fit together with screws, bolts or adhesives? In this situation, the reverse engineer turns to rendering the subject in order to scrutinize its constituent parts. Rendering here carries a triple meaning: to depict, to tear apart, and to boil down—whether dissecting a subject with an epistemological knife, circumscribing it with a drawing instrument, or processing it to extract its essence.
Mun harvests soil from upstate New York watersheds with high concentrations of mycorrhizal networks—the underground webs connecting plant roots with fungal hyphae that allow for the transfer of water, nutrients, carbon, and defense signals across the forest. Mun compresses the excavated earth into hand-formed spheres and then displays them on shelves built from species of trees from the sample site. Compacted through elbow grease and polished with skin oils, these shiny objects function as highly concentrated, auratically dense, embodied samples.
Assiff attempts to reanimate inert concrete tiles, embossed with art deco botanical designs, by smearing them with bioidentical plant-based phytoestrogen and testosterone gels, substituting human hormone therapies for plant VOCs—chemical aromas that signal to pollinators, predators and other plants—in a ham-fisted gesture of anthropomorphism. Chang reverse engineers nodes of sugarcane using welded steel and pantyhose sourced from her family’s hosiery distribution business.
In Debugging the Earth, rendering, in the representational sense, is highly mediated. Chang engages the virtual logic of “skinning” by wrapping extruded foam forms with wallpapered imagery from hosiery product graphic design. Irving’s wall works upsample images aggregated from the internet and personal digital photography, using the magic wand of photoshop to make jagged-edge excisions that get photographically redeveloped into silkscreens; Assiff’s debossed paintings depict plant-covered infrastructure—pesticide treated turf grass, utility poles and buried pipeline—using extruded methacrylic plastic to create a vacuformed-like, polymerized surface.
Debugging the Earth asks the viewer to consider the inherent violence of inquiring into both the human-built and natural world with an engineer’s mindset: extraction, dissection and reconstitution. The exhibition surveys artists working at points of compression between deep time, industry, and the corporeal body/body politic; rendering goods and biologics in order to disturb, to reveal and to “penetrate the mist-enveloped regions” of this Earth.
–text by Michael Assiff