Signal

Alison Hiltner & Bryn Jackson

About the exhibition

The enormity of a complex system like climate, an ecosystem, or an organism can be scaled by looking at the interrelation between any of the given parts. In Signal, works by Alison Hiltner and Bryn Jackson amplify interconnected relationships of life on a fragile planet and the vulnerability of physical contact inherent to having a body.

Hiltner’s work Tethers translates the most familiar signal of life—a heartbeat—into a touchable interface in which the most basic elemental process longs for connection. Activated in response to a single human heartbeat, this signal is dispersed throughout the network of the installation.

Even as the desire to connect is strong, the piece Survival Tactics actively recoils at the impulse when it detects a spike in environmental temperature from the heat of a body. Given time, the root creatures acclimate to the advance, and the tendrils relax, awaiting the next environmental stimulation.

While Hiltner’s work approximates life through interaction with human input, Jackson’s work seeks to reanimate what was once alive.

A fallen mulberry tree is cut, dried, and displayed in an approximation of its original form in When A Tree Falls (Quartered, Quarantined), intending to preserve the object through its value as a specimen. Traces of the environmental effects of insects, woodpeckers, and a lightning strike remain visible, yet the displayed tree is an isolated body, displaced from an ecosystem where it could still be an integral component.

Similarly, the basis of Deficient Form of Heaven is a still photograph, given a destabilized life by digital animation. An endless loop, the video projects a landscape of prolonged waiting, an uneasy stasis that—in its desire to preserve a moment—disrupts the ongoing evolution of the forest ecology.

In Signal, Hiltner and Jackson mimic the complexities and web of relationships of any given system through latex and silicone, acrylic and wood. Their work both desires and resists connection as do all bodies, human and nonhuman, in ways that are vulnerable and beautiful and precarious and deeply interconnected.