ARE WE THE WEED OR THE WILDFLOWER? by Madelaine Corbin Superscript numbers designate footnotes. Roman numerals designate endnotes.
ARTIST JEFF SCHOFIELD OFFERS inter- and intra-
world relations throughout his solo exhibition, “Seasonal Adjustments.” As humans are welcomed to navigate the communal constellation in the immediate time of our bodies1 (versus the slow time of planets), Schofield gifts us the opportunity to experience a place where life has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen.i In this space, artworks are suspended in time.2 The objects and event-memories are halted in their decay for the fleeting moment of this exhibition, poised between Earth Day and World Environment Day. The consequences of time are amplified with the reminder of the other between—the one that follows World Environment Day and precedes the next Earth Day. “Seasonal Adjustments” sits in one interstice before the next in a constant cycling of time, attention, and interaction. Schofield’s event-based, site-specific, and found object art installations are multiscalar compositions. Each piece is first a world of its own. Artistic collections of individual units coalesce into organisms, memories, and speculations that interact with one another in a singular space—an organism with a speculation, a memory with an organism, a speculation with a memory. The compositions then pull viewers into different spaces and relations while pushing outward to the natural world beyond the gallery walls: planks of barn wood exist here and also out there, a weed lit by a bulb is suspended inside and also grows under 1. Ken Chen writes that the navigation of a space in time with our bodies (rather than emitting brain pulses into the dematerialized zone of the imagination) is where we act and react spontaneously. These experiences lacking performativity and instead welcoming spontaneity are where life happens, Chen says. 2. A selection of the artworks is also suspended literally in place.
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the sun outside, the burnt limbs of trees hang from a ceiling and also rest upon the earth where fireweed now blooms.3 Commemorations of events and speculations about inter species identities are on display as Schofield ruefully explores what it means to affect and be affected by our metastasizing ecological catastrophes.ii The work’s mission suggests a blurring of boundaries between worlds. Their interactions—our interactions—are vital. Schofield’s works act as descriptions of climate change and anthoropocentric (in)action. His ‘descriptions’ (versus hypotheses) are rooted in past events: the climate retaliated, devastation occurred, remnants were collected and organized. While this process of describing initially appears linear and in the past tense, the results offer unexpected and exponential ideas. The mathematics of Schofield’s work articulate a darkness to the perception of accretion. One piece of sunfaded plastic plus one weed encased in resin does not equal a total of two. Instead, the results of human intrusions upon the earth equal infinite, cascading results. Singularly, a piece of shiny blue plastic on the beach is not frightening. What that one piece means, however, when tens, thousands, billions4 of littered plastic pieces accumulate is a monstrous accretion not easily halted. What Schofield offers is the isolation of each unit, specimen, or cell. The cells of his works grow, evolve, and become together. Schofield offers a 3. The earth leaves flowers on its own graves. Unlike those that humans often leave, these flowers are not cut but instead continue the processes of blooming, seeding, sprouting, and evolving. 4. This count of litter is not linear but logarithmic (101, 103, 109) and synonymous with the climate catastrophe which progresses in effects tenfold with the realization of each disaster preceding the next. It is also the inverse of an exponent (which is how a footnote is visually written).
