© Amelyn Ng 2024
Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time
research, exhibitionYEAR:
2021-2022
TYPE:
Exhibition, VI PER Gallery, Prague
December 17, 2021 — February 2, 2022.
DESIGN TEAM:
Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, Christine Giorgio (Friends Making Work)
COLLABORATOR:
Nathan Davis, composer
STUDENT ASSISTANCE:
Remi Qiu, Ellie Cody, Sarah Chriss, Carrie Li
FUNDING:
RISD Professional Development Fund AY21-22
State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic (via VI PER)
LINKS:
gallery webpage
planetaryhomeimprovement.store
Kim Förster gallery talk
2021-2022
TYPE:
Exhibition, VI PER Gallery, Prague
December 17, 2021 — February 2, 2022.
DESIGN TEAM:
Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, Christine Giorgio (Friends Making Work)
COLLABORATOR:
Nathan Davis, composer
STUDENT ASSISTANCE:
Remi Qiu, Ellie Cody, Sarah Chriss, Carrie Li
FUNDING:
RISD Professional Development Fund AY21-22
State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic (via VI PER)
LINKS:
gallery webpage
planetaryhomeimprovement.store
Kim Förster gallery talk
INFO:
The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikrete Stucco. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stockpiled, and sold across global DIY supply-chains. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum.
What planetary urgencies, temporalities and extractions undergird products of just-in-time geology?
Rewriting shelf life, this exhibition of physical and digital artifacts includes a stratigraphic stack wall of salvaged materials, a geological soundscape, deep section drawings, a tabletop palindrome How-to video, DIY unbuilding instruction sheets, and a slow-scrolling website. If the Eames’s Powers of Ten organized the universe by relative scale, Planetary Home Improvement redesignates its earthly substrates by relative temporality—from the planet to the point of sale.
The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikrete Stucco. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stockpiled, and sold across global DIY supply-chains. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum.
What planetary urgencies, temporalities and extractions undergird products of just-in-time geology?
Rewriting shelf life, this exhibition of physical and digital artifacts includes a stratigraphic stack wall of salvaged materials, a geological soundscape, deep section drawings, a tabletop palindrome How-to video, DIY unbuilding instruction sheets, and a slow-scrolling website. If the Eames’s Powers of Ten organized the universe by relative scale, Planetary Home Improvement redesignates its earthly substrates by relative temporality—from the planet to the point of sale.
