Functioning Construction, Formations of Destruction

 

Functioning Construction, Formations of Destruction

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New York is a city comprised of idiosyncratic communities and cultural flavors that are expressed through the hyper-localized small business. A place where culture is expressed through nostalgia, artifacts, archaic processes, and human agency. Functioning Construction is about the human as an organic and self-learning apparatus. A living and observable being that faces insurmountable challenges and pays homage to the power of the human spirit. Individually, each space acts as a living mind map, revealing the functioning distinctiveness between the owner and process. Each machine, tool, string, and formation speaks to an organic process constructed from technological shifts and external instruments moving towards cohabitation. It functions in the present, drawing from the past to imagine the future. A reflection of the mind as an instrument of orchestration, achieving a modal completion via, cultural influence, thought, and the tools at hand. There is no evolution without constraint. Each space is different, and unique, and provides different configurations and challenges to photography. I like to think of composition as formation and the aesthetic subconscious of construction. A formation that alludes to death in process or what I call, formations of destruction. The “in process” is a mental space between points, where information is lost or preserved, and perhaps never finished. Many of these businesses have survived for decades, offering us artifacts and wisdom that will be retained or lost within the dust of the technological contemporary. A living relic caught between the graveyard and the future, continually expanding and retracting, forming the disfigured face of the human condition. Small business as a mirror, moving backwards in time and contrary to aspects of contemporary life. A place without QR codes, price tags, and layout maps that force human interaction and exhibit culture. A space predicated on human agency, the hyper-localized small business.

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