WAYFARER - LAB:D
November 2 - 30, 2018
“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it,”
Rebecca Solnit, form Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Wayfarer aims to re-present the experience of material encounters witnessed during walks in cities around the world. The works interpret scenarios LAB:D witnessed over the past three years in streets from places as disparate as Tokyo, St Louis, Brussels, Sydney, and Mexico City. Some of these discoveries are the result of accidents—a toppled sign, a forgotten glove—while others reflect the interaction of flora with the built environment.
Having lived for over a decade without owning a car, LAB:D have found there is a certain attention that one becomes accustomed to while walking, a different kind of intimacy that one has in relation to the environment in which they are navigating. Formal occurrences between nature and the built environment are much more proximal, and unique to the pace of travelling by foot. The works express not a sublime sense of nature, or grand effects of human intervention, but rather acknowledge the poetic entanglements between natural elements and industrial marks on the urban landscape.
Taken out of their context, these formal fragments make visible the happenstantial situations which time has allowed, as different materials aggregate and forms settle into positions of intrigue.
“… Wayfaring is a movement of self-renewal or becoming rather than the transport of already constituted beings from one location to another. Making their ways through the tangle of the world, wayfarers grow into its fabric and contribute through their movements to its ever-evolving weave,”
Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History
LAB:D is the collaborative art practice of Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Addoley Dzegede, who both received BFA degrees from Maryland Institute College of Art (2006 and 2005, respectively) and MFA degrees in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis (2013 and 2015, respectively), where they were both Chancellor’s Graduate Fellows. Through diverse material and formal approaches, their interdisciplinary practice pulls from everyday observations and experiences of their relationship, with consideration for the cultural contexts of a given location. Using humor and juxtaposition as consistent strategies, they position objects in relation to memory, cultural history, and social behavior. Resulting projects are physical projections of meandering, yet critical conversations.
As LAB:D, they have been artists-in-residence at The University of Kansas, and have both been in residence at Arteles Creative Center (Finland) and Nes (Iceland). Barrois and Dzegede were winners of the Great Rivers Biennial at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016 and 2018, respectively).
