Stain (2009)

9:41 minutes

To create this video I constructed a steel device that attaches to my car’s tailpipe and uses small 6” by 6” pieces of drawing paper to filter my automotive exhaust. Over the course of the following year, I placed a new piece of paper in the device each day that I drove my car both to document and to create a drawing from the pollution that I produced. The individual character of the exhaust marks on each drawing was the result of many variables including the distance of my trip, the speed of the car, the ambient temperature, and so on. For this short animation, I compiled scans of the resulting series of over 140 works on paper in an attempt to make visible and material that which can seem both invisible and immaterial. I am interested in the inadvertent, often imperceptible, marks that I make on the world, and the tension that exists between the conflicting desires both to make a mark and to leave no trace.

The paper variant of this project can be found here.

A longer essay about this project that was published in Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Quarterly can be found here.