COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Images and words by Matt Siber

This project was created during my two years of residence in the CPS Lives arts organization. The organization places artists in Chicago Public Schools for one-year residencies. My two years of residence spans 2019 to 2021 and was disrupted by the pandemic in March of 2020. I am working in the A.N. Pritzker Elementary School in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, where my two daughters are students. Most of this work was created in 2020-21. This project is a response to - and is largely possible because of - the pandemic.

Collective Consciousness visually engages objects in educational space that make institutional learning possible. Thinking sculpturally, I aim to present these objects slightly outside of their usual context. Singular objects are reoriented, relocated, or photographed as monolithic; often appearing visually abrupt and obstructive. Careful attention is paid to the object’s relationship to photographic space.

Pushing the sculptural approach further, I create temporary assemblages of objects to be photographed. These constructions offer a range of possible metaphors regarding education and culture. My assemblages walk a line between the verge of collapse and relative stability. I am interested in this tension as a way to think about the process of growing and learning as a young person. I see a playfulness in these photographs that references many of the grade school approaches to making learning interesting and fun.

The bulk of this work has been made during the pandemic in an empty school. The idea was refined and strengthened in response to the pandemic as a way to employ the idle educational objects in the absence of children and teachers. The presence of students limits what I can assemble without risking student safety. The empty school gives me license to create pieces that are more precarious, and sometimes fall down. An empty school also affords me access to the classrooms, whereas the pre-pandemic pieces had to be created in hallways.