Luke Stettner

Working with the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Pittsburgh, we investigated the history of time standardization in Pittsburgh and how this modernization contributed to the region’s air pollution from increased railroad transportation and steel production. The exhibition also recognizes individuals and organizations that champion the health of our skies and communities.

Inside the exhibition is a functional solar darkroom. Three exposure units harness sunlight via tubing from the roof to make photograms. These exposures are created by placing objects directly onto or above the surface of a light-sensitive material—the object shadows are rendered white; light is rendered black.

The solar darkroom is activated by us, artist-in-residence, community workshops, and an experimental school in collaboration with the Mattress Factory. The images made in the solar darkroom are accompanied by collages, diagrams and archival material across the exhibitions three floors. This body of work is evolving, with new pieces added throughout the exhibition’s duration.

We extend our thanks to Natalie Miczikus, Dylan Critchfield-Sales,Mattie Cannon, Danny Bracken and David Oresick at the Mattress Factory. Additional thanks to Media Curator Miriam Meislik and the Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

The following collections from the Library System are featured in the exhibition:

> Allegheny County, Pa. Health Department, Bureau of Air Pollution Control Records
> Allegheny Observatory Collection
> Fred Wright Papers
> Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) Records
> Harold Corsini Photograph Collections
> Ken Kobus Photograph Collections
> Michelle Madoff Papers
> Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection
> Smoke Investigation Activities of the Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa. Research Records
> Smoke Control Lantern Slide Collection
> UE Research on Labor Issues
> United States Steel Corporation Duquesne Works Industrial Relations Department Records
> William J. Gaughan Collection

When Smartmatics, a multinational company that makes electronic voting systems, filed its monumental complaint against Fox Corporation/Fox News Network in December 2020, it laid bare one of the disinformation mechanisms by which facts can become unfixed, one tweet at a time.

Filling Airways Patriot Machine is the result of a years-long collaborative project. Drawing from the 285-page court document, we convert the dizzying, relentless legalese into long-form poetry, pulling excerpts from the complaint that valorize, mock, condemn, and justify faceless villains and foreign collaborators. Each mini-poem is then converted to a poster-sized painting and hung on the cinderblock walls of the gallery.

A subset of twelve poem-drawings will be on display accompanied by a selection of several digital, screen printed, and hand-drawn works on paper.

This is a collaborative exhibition – which is to say an exhibition conceived of and produced by three people, across continents – that makes subject of killing machines and their methods of linguistic categorization. We are humored and we are horrified at the way military vernacular expropriates the language of our animal and nature bound world. The hornet is an all-weather fighter jet; the badger is an artillery vehicle; the bloodhound is a surface-to-air missile (so is a scorpion); the flying fish is an Exocet missile; the barracuda is a submarine. And on it goes. The language of war is flooded with the classification of animal science – of land and sea, animals living and extinct -- a phenomenon that normalizes armed violence and predation as something “natural” and affirms the environment and its sentient lives as one more resource to be colonized.

The image sets in the exhibition range in their material from Silkscreen, rope, drawing, photographs and risographs. Each uses distinct and parallel strategies to draw out this sinister language, making puns of pun, multiplying doubles, and blowing all covers.

Viceroy/ A butterfly that mimics a monarch (scentless)

Viceroy/ An American cigarette brand marketed towards veterans (“manly men”)

Viceroy/ A proxy ruler (colonial)

World is a Word is taken from a 2009 Charles Bernstein lecture at the University of Chicago (parts of which would later find their way into his essay The Truth in Pudding). Bernstein’s writing is democratic, multiform, and chaotic, drawing on nearly everything in service of “the poetics of bewilderment.” We liked this phrase because we found an affinity in its essence and its alliteration: how it uses language to trip over itself.

The primer for our work — shared and individually — is a dedication to language as a system of poetics and aesthetics; as a tool of intervention and ingenuity rather than a solution-machine. The project between us began long before this show took form, as we began to exchange our notebooks; both held lists full of words, each determined to conjure images. Our sources blended language on McCarthyism, manuals for learning language, idioms, sound and songs, lamentations, puns, light and shadow, time (numbers, calendars), things we overheard on the news from our cars or studios. Patterns surfaced as we both gravitated towards language that expressed distress, conflict, communication.

And we tripped all the time, in the spirit of Bernstein, not knowing where we were going and liked it that way. Suzanne’s PAINT became PAIN+ in error; then it became an engine. It was an exercise in call-and-response, a game of telephone. We eschewed instruction in service of responsiveness and tumult in service of patience. And because we made this collaborative work during the pandemic, everything was done alone and apart (save the work in the darkroom, the last piece). Suzanne would walk a sloped mile to Luke’s home and leave and pick up bagged artwork on the doorstep.

Images and words can be one thing, inextricable. Nonrepresentation is not the same as abstraction. Reiteration and nonsense: these are methods of grasping for meaning and reorganizing knowledge, together.

This is an exhibition about muteness and linguistic affect, tools used to mitigate the atrocity of our world. Here, language is understood as a vehicle for impacted feeling as much as its blockade.

Many texts add up to an imperfect and inadequate language, sourced from a wide range of fields and disciplines: military reference books and dictionaries, hymn and songbooks, compositional assignments, literary criticism, books on anagrams, codes and ciphers, riddles and idioms, newspapers, and a theater script. My son mistakenly called a parrot a poet, and that perfect slip of the tongue entered the work too. Language — less fixed than photographs, and far more manifold — began to overlap with itself as I collected it: bombs dropping and rain falling are described the same way by meteorologists and military generals.

One of the few images that appear in this show is a photograph of my great grandparents, who narrowly escaped the Nazis. This picture overlooks a monolithic concrete sculpture modeled after a study carrel in my high school library, which I witnessed to be in the shape of a swastika. The documents in the exhibition are attributed to my maternal great grandparents and great Aunt, who were murdered in Auschwitz. The disconnect that I describe — between far-flung atrocity and my own conscious experience — exists not only between continents but right inside of my own history. It's a familiar story of attenuation: the members of my family that survived the holocaust never spoke a single word about it.

Many pieces in the exhibition are collaborative; I worked very closely with Max Stolkin & Tim Bearse, Tova Carlin, Will Cornwall, Lynn Kahan, Daniel Marcus, Ofer Wolberger, Suzanne Silver, Jon Beacham, Carmen Winant, and my mother, Carol Case. What we've made is outward looking in every sense, reaching towards language (rather than their own status as art objects) as a decidedly imperfect tool of exchange and mismatch.