Jesse Darling. Support Level

About

JD’s practice engages forms of embodiment particular to the modern subject and its ulterior expressions. Informed by their personal experience as well as (counter)historical narratives, JD explores the inherent vulnerability of being a body, and how the inevitable mortality of living things translates to civilizations and structures. This “precarious optimism"—the idea that living beings, societies, and technologies are fundamentally fallible and fungible—underscores the artist’s practice. 

For their exhibition at Chapter, JD draws from the clinical as a structural and social form of abjection. Mobility aids are contorted towards the corporeal, simultaneously rigid and lipid, both the object of support and its inferred subject. A commode chair crawls along the floor, as a hygiene curtain reveals a gaping wound; health advice posters in asemic script hang with uncertainty, over-painted as though vandalized—architectures of the care-industrial complex pressed, distressed, and in pain. 

At once activated and incapacitated, these sculptures exert a precarious force somewhere between marked resilience and physical decline. They exist in between being and burden, where bodily atrophy collaborates with the prosthetic to forge new forms of agency. The works struggle against their own affliction and our own comfortable assumptions: heaving, synthetic, and all too keenly felt.