Un/Bearing – Art Exhibit

“Un/Bearing” presents a new body of installation-based sculptures that confront the politics embedded in monuments, architecture, and the myths of American stability. Built from stacked cinder blocks, steel scaffolding, cast metal objects, and salvaged architectural materials, the works construct unstable civic structures that appear both under construction and on the verge of collapse.

Traditional monuments project permanence, authority, and national unity. These structures refuse that fiction. Instead they lean, cantilever, and remain visibly braced exposing the labor, repair, and improvisation that actually hold systems together. Cheap, readily available materials such as cinder blocks and construction hardware become the foundation for monumental scale, foregrounding the relationship between architecture, class politics, and the labor that builds the world but is rarely commemorated within it.

Embedded within the structures are cast artifacts drawn from working-class life. Their presence shifts the monument away from state power and toward the people who sustain society through invisible labor.

Responding to Buffalo’s industrial landscape, the installation treats the gallery as a site of civic tension. These scaffold-like anti-monuments resist nationalist spectacle and instead expose the precarity underlying economic systems structures that demand endurance while denying stability.