Danial Nord’s solo installation at the Torrance Art Museum, Cloud Nine (2018), presents translucent human-like sculptures, lit by LEDs responding to social media and video feeds. Nord fire-casted clear polycarbonate sheets into the shapes of recognizable figures hunched over their cellphones—the Businessman, Gunman, Mother, Alien, Illegal and Angel—and installed them in a darkened room set against electronic sounds. The video footage is determined by an algorithm that converts them into light, brightening each of Nord’s figures and making indissoluble the human body from its technology-driven needs.

These plastic and metal figures are also stuck with found objects and beach driftwood that reference the natural world of yesteryear. Cloud Nine depicts bodies as non-medium specific, in a Rauschenberg combine-like twist on the human body. The Angel possesses wings and floats by wires, displaying a satirical levitation. Another figure appears to either levitate or hang from the ceiling by a noose. It looks like a celestial ghost liberated by technology that grants an eternal stream of information.

In this installation, Nord muddles life-and-death distinctions, and this central complication might be the most interesting aspect of Cloud Nine: what happens when knowledge becomes over-prioritized, way above other psychological needs like face-to-face connection and real life relationships? Will our data-driven virtual world ultimately lead to the dissolution and death of what makes us human?

Nord’s artworks are both public and private: they reflect personal introspections on our increasing reliance on data-driven industries and the Internet. Nord also jumped through bureaucratic hoops to make these figures: Parks and Recreation, the Port of LA, City of LA Fire Department and Life Guard Department approved Nord’s fire-casting to sculpt the plastic on South Bay beaches. Nord’s figures are roped together by internal mechanics and external bureaucracies, suggesting what the human body relies on for short-term survival, which leads to irrevocable long-term dependencies.

In her 2009 article “Race As Technology,” for Camera Obscura, media studies theorist Beth Coleman discusses how the tools we use to wield power in this world and augment our six senses (think of contact lenses that are now 3D printable) become an extension of who we are. These tools are prosthetic: they allow us to more easily navigate the world and shape how we express ourselves. As a prosthetic tool, the internet provides mental space for online communities to exist. From Men’s Rights movements to Gun Control advocates, such communities reinforce, insulate and protect belief systems, giving them life and longevity. Nord’s work reinforces this implication: pulsing with data, the prosthetic limb becomes the entire corporeal self. In its quest for information, the human body has taken the complete computational form of circuits and plastic—making it more than just cyborgian, but totally unrecognizable. One might recall Yeats’ ambivalence about another kind of revolution: “He too, has resigned his part / In the casual comedy; / He too, has been changed in turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

A slate of concrete with blue Skittles scattered across it is illuminated by a clamp light in Full Haus’ current outdoor exhibition: “Andy Robert: Heavy Rain and Lightning.” Titled Dream Deferred (Skittles on Concrete), this simply executed sculpture seems commonplace enough: “‘Skittles and pavement’ were the words circling around me when I was coming to conclusions about the Trayvon Martin case,” explains Robert. “‘What happens to a dream deferred?’” asked Robert, echoing the opening line of Langston Hughes’s poem which is also in the press release for the show. Does it “‘crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet…or does it explode?’”

Robert’s outdoor sculptures and installations reinforce the disturbing evidence in the Trayvon Martin case by responding to a particular fact: the Skittles and Arizona iced tea Martin had on him (and no weapon) during the time of his shooting. These items, Robert imagines, represent a loss of childlike innocence, social injustice and stunted dreams. Robert’s outdoor sculptures and installations also reveal his burgeoning semiotics as an open system with slippages in meaning.

When associated with a murder trial gone awry, Dream Deferred opens the viewer to a deadly absent referent (a lost life) and the work’s mundanity becomes an uncomfortable, suffocating silence—one that is associated with the lexicon of our cultural trauma over recent, preventable gun shootings.

After all, how does one memorialize injustice? An article from The Guardian states that Martin’s bag of Skittles remains unopened to this day and should “belong in a museum.” Perhaps this is so, but what if we open this bag, like Robert does, because nothing is ever neatly contained, nor remains immaculate forever? Many believe that the circumstances of Martin’s death reflect a callous disregard for human life, reminding us of the frailty of our mortality while also violating our sense of ethics. Robert’s work captures a nationwide lack of control and confusion that many feel over Martin’s case—and every other recently—that now speckles America’s consciousness as the awful “new normal.”

Andy Robert: Heavy Rain and Lightning

December 6th – January 31st

Full Haus

2042 Griffith Park Blvd

Los Angeles, CA  90039

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