Amidst the Ruins was an exhibition of new works by Val Britton, Michael Damm
and Zachary Royer Scholz, which explored the role of destruction in creativity. What motivates us to disassemble or destroy things? Why is it pleasurable to deface? How does violence transform our relationships to objects? And what does it reveal about their mechanisms and meanings? Works by these three artists ruin the surfaces of objects to thematize the contexts in which they appear, and to turn them towards new ends. The figures of destruction produced by these artists imply and explore our situation between birth and death, and present these poles not merely as opposites, but rather as mutually integral to processes of creation.

Val Britton creates immersive collages with large sheets of slashed paper that approximate and, in the process, reinvent the language of maps. In the first stages of her process, she sketches out the highway routes once frequented by her deceased father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers cross country throughout his life. She then overwhelms the surfaces of the paper with the violence of her cutting and pasting, and the ensuing tears spill out of the sheets to produce objects that occupy a liminal space between two and three dimensions. The results are maps drawn with blades, which depict not merely objective terrain, but also the performance of their own production and the impulses that informed them.

Michael Damm’s photographs and videos present amalgams of desolate imagery, which are both documentary and psychological. He finds the inspiration for his
work in the devastation and decay of urban environments; and his discoveries
evoke mnemonic associations that resonate with unanticipated meanings. In
Amidst the Ruins, Damm exhibited a video projection, titled Last house on the left
(leaving Oakland), a close study of a derelict home on the border of Oakland. In
addition, he has created an installation consisting of several image sequences
along an incision in the gallery’s wall, which was inspired by the now neglected, Southern Pacific Station train depot.

Zachary Royer Scholz tears up and reconstructs pieces of furniture and elements of architecture. In the process he finds new significance in them and reveals a shifting flow of meanings beneath the otherwise static frameworks of our involvements. Scholz installed two structures at MISSION 17, which were produced from the skeletons of furniture and engaged the gallery’s architecture.