Planetary Home Improvement: From Just in Time to Geological Time
Exhibited at VI PER GalleryPrague, Czech Republic
December 17 2021-February 12, 2022
Design Team: Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara
Sound Design: Nathan Davis
Student Assistants: Sarah Chriss, Ellie Cody, Carrie Li, Wenyue (Remi) Qiu
For VI PER Gallery: Irena Lehkoživová and Barbora Špičáková
Photos: Zdeněk Porcal (Studio Flusser)
This research exhibition and its resulting ephemera springs from an interest in the geological provenance of common building material and material economies that seemed to scale up endlessly from what we tend to think is a settled geological past.
Home Improvement—not unlike geology’s fluvial, faulting, aeolian processes—is an aspirational, never quite there, perpetual future state. Does improvement end? Is there such a state as improved?
Home Improvement—not unlike geology’s fluvial, faulting, aeolian processes—is an aspirational, never quite there, perpetual future state. Does improvement end? Is there such a state as improved?
001 concept render
002 gallery installation detail
The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikrete. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stacked, and sold across global DIY supply-chains, from Home Depot to Bauhaus and OBI. 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.
003 gallery installation detail
004 gallery installation detail
Winner of VI PER Gallery’s 2021 international open call, Planetary Home Improvement is a design and research project that takes stock of the terrestrial home via the big-box DIY home improvement store to examine the geological life of product accumulation, installation, and instruction through both physical and digital gallery artifacts.
005-008 installation images, VI PER Gallery