An exhibition that invites us to take a closer look at invisible infrastructure

Jeremy Lepisto, What Lies Below, 2008. Kiln-formed glass. photo: aimee sones.

The computer network that holds your bank records and your Facebook photos. The refrigerator that keeps your milk cold. The highway or subway that carries you to work. Contemporary life relies on an increasingly intricate infrastructure, but we so rarely notice much less consider the power lines, generators, or road systems that permit us to run through our days. In fact, we usually do our best to avoid them: cropping out utility poles from the edges of a photograph, concealing the wires behind our computer into flexible tubes, and stowing away power lines underground. Why do we feel the need to hide the infrastructure that are actually central to our daily lives? A mixed-media exhibition now on view at Ohio State University Urban Arts Space gallery seeks to put the focus squarely on the industrial and technological landscape in which we live.

With the “Tracing Lines” exhibition, co-curators Aimee Sones and Jessica Larva have brought together work from a variety of media, including glass sculpture, photography, and paintings to take a closer look at this rarely considered part of the landscape.Jeremy Lepisto, for instance, provided a green glass sculpture that evokes the distinct structure of a bridge, underscored with black lines drawn onto the glass in crisscrossing beams (pictured above).

Sones and Larva, both artists themselves, believe that the glass pieces included in the exhibition offer a unique outlook. There is very little ostentatious embellishment involved in the design of these purely functional infrastructure, something glass artists share in some cases. Consider the work of Samantha Laffey, for example. Her miniatures of glass windmills (pictured below) emphasize that beauty can found in the simplicity of pure unembellished architectural shapes.

Samantha Laffey, Ode to an Alternate Memory, 2010. Fused and flameworked glass. photo: aimee sones.

As a rich and long lasting material, glass art furthermore offers a timeless quality that papers and photographs, easily faded or browned, do not. Yet, as Larva observes, there exists a strange tension here: society rapidly assembles and disassembles technology the instant improvements can be made, so the glass art modeled after these bridges, power lines, and generators has the potential to “last longer than the structures they represent.”

Sones acknowledges that to curate an exhibition regarding infrastructure seems like a ridiculous notion to some people, but she hopes that the artwork on display will “start the dialogue” about “why [infrastructure] is there” in the first place “and why we need it,” how it impacts us all even if we do try and ignore its existence.

“In making infrastructure visible [in this exhibition],” adds Larva in agreement, “perhaps it will no longer be invisible as we go about our daily lives.”

—Anna Tatelman