Managed Retreat
2024
steel, stone, paint, tires
15” x 16” x 52”
Managed Retreat is a sculptural meditation on current frameworks for moving human infrastructures and settlements away from coastal areas in response to a complex of climate-related crises. The realignment of coastal places and communities is a fraught proposition entangled with structural inequity, logics of property and ownership, and concerns for cultural and community survivance.
In this work, climate-driven/driving alterations of space and the problematics of “managed retreat” are distilled in the form of a utilitarian hand truck typically used to transport heavy items short distances. Its configuration and functionality are modified by stones that are captured, if not assimilated, within the object’s steel structure.
Each stone is sourced from the aftermath of a cliff collapse, flood, or site of significant coastal erosion impacting infrastructures and/or coastal developments situated within the Tongva-Chumash-Kizh, Acjachemen, and Kumeyayy territories known as Southern California. Collection sites include: slope failures undermining the LOSSAN Rail Corridor's (Pacific Surfliner) cliffside route through Del Mar and San Clemente, public beach access areas inundated by winter storm and tidal surges, oceanfront estates with record-setting valuations, condemned beach houses, and an artificial landscaping feature installed at a UC Chancellor’s residence that overlooks the Pacific from atop a sacred Kumeyaay burial site.
The sculpture’s index of re- and displaced rocks posits the politics and temporalities of “managed retreat” as a continuing and recursive process of deracination. Yet the stones also render the hand truck useless, staging a rethinking of temporality and (f)utility, while raising the question “who benefits?” from climate-driven uprooting. Through its craft, conscious collecting, and research, the project pursues interrelated historical-material questions and speculative gestures: is the unfolding process of “managed retreat” an ongoing settler incursion—an unfettered attack? Or can it be reimagined and reconfigured as a way of moving toward just transitions, reparation, and rematriation?
Notes on fabrication:
Putting together Managed Retreat was a long a process of planning and puzzling. If you go to the highlight reel titled “series of tubes” on my ig profile, you can glimpse many moments of piecing-together that went into this thing. It’s neither here nor there in the grand scheme, but it is important to my practice and interest(s) in making art: I do all the fabrication myself, start to finish.
All the holes in the rocks are blind (about 1-1.5” deep), meaning they don’t go all the way through. If there’s anything clever about the fabrication process, it was all the jigs and fixtures involved with aligning the tubes that appear collinear, parallel, and (at times) perpendicular at their intersections with the stones. The trickiest bits are perhaps the few rock joints with multiple visually interesting axes. It’s nothing crazy, but if drilling a bunch of collinear, perpendicular, and/or multi-axis blind holes in a very dense irregular volume with no flat surfaces our mounting points sounds like a good time, then you know what’s up.
All that said: the craft doesn’t begin or end with fabrication. There’s also the craft(s) of research, collecting, thinking, and writing that scaffold the idea. If anything, craft is taking the making seriously, deeply, and simultanesouly, with concepts. Not only making the thing to make the thing, but (critically, if not, ruthlessly) thinking it too.