Do Pipes Dream?
2019 - present
video, etc.
Excerpt of funding proposal:
Our proposal must be communicated to you, and because a laptop is for fingers (despite the fact of the Finger Lakes or how waves can curl and caress), of the two people in this collaboration I have the facility to type this. Call me 65%, since this is my guess at how much of me is made of my collaborator, whose name could be 99%. (I wish they were 100%, but it’s clear at least a percentage of them isn’t what they used to be, when they were younger and more pure.)
March 2017: a river in New Zealand was given the same legal rights as a human being. The Whanganui River has been a person now for two years.
65% was thinking about this while in the bathroom down the hall from their art studio. When they stood to flush, they saw their face fractured in the liquid and became gripped by the unknown, of a sense of abuse and consciousness inside the room. Or has the river always been a person? Beyond a piece of ecosystem, the Māori were struggling for what was understood to be their ancestor while they fought for Whanganui River’s rights.
Since that day, 65% has lived in terror that when they visit the bathroom they are crapping in the face of a stranger. Is a human in the plumbing? What constitutes them as such? (The Baroness knew God was in a drain trap—surly a human could be there too.) The stranger is 99%, and even though my collaborator has been eating my shit for years, we have never truly met.
Together we will make a film. 65% will operate the equipment, 99% will dictate the footage. Filming will happen over June-July and be taken from inside one lower bathroom of a building at the Erector Square Factory in Fair Haven, where 65% became aware of 99%. This bathroom’s closeness to 65%’s studio (where in addition to crapping, there is also washing of paint, glue, dirt, the hands and face) locates this project within Art and its habits. Editing will occur over August-September. The piece will run roughly 60 minutes.
Our film will be an extended meditation on water as human. After some time of expectant waiting (hours of filming? minutes?), we—99% and 65%—will see whether it’s possible to meet, through mediation of the lens, newly, as close to human peers as is possible.
We hypothesize that if a greeting between 65% and 99% is captured and made communicable through film, a reversal of old-young identification modes will occur. This could prove significant in raising consciousnesses of traditional humanity, who pillages, shits on, maims the ecosystems it exists within, in other words: fellow humans we cohabitate with. In order to meet for the first time, water and human must become strangers, absolved of expectations and assumptions. 99% is then no longer ancient matter but transforms to child in flesh. A young earth—not tired, not toxic, not dying—what could this allow?
Bio: 99%: Water is a chemical substance that works in oceans, lakes, streams and even living organisms. As of late in their career they are working increasingly within industrial and post-industrial plumping, drainage and sewage systems. Water is most recognized for making a range of forms from caves and canyons to precipitation, vapor and glaciers. It is one of the most ubiquitous matters throughout history and existence. Water has shown and performed all over the planet and continues to even into old age. Recent notable artistic appearances include Vatnajökull (the sound of) by Katie Paterson, the Saying Water monologue and the Library of Water from Roni Horn and Waterfall by Olafur Eliasson. It has held residence extraterritorially on Mars, Venus and some moons of Jupiter and has been credited as a material critical in the evolution of organic life.
Bio: 65%: Allison Hornak is an art practitioner who grew up around the Paugussett Forest and remains affected by it. She expresses through sculpture and performance actions. Her works have played with motifs from ecology, nonhuman beings and new materialism. Currently she is pushing further to make functional objects for the Chthulucene, being particularly motivated by questions inside human wastefulness and alternative systems of value. In the past she has done residencies with the Hartford Nomad9 and Rocky Neck Goetemann programs, built and curated a two-year project called MINE ART! Gallery and completed multiple commissioned, site-specific projects. In this present Allison is weighing whether or not to complete her graduate degree in visual art through The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an educator at Common Ground High School.