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Carla
Bengtson

By
For
and With
Other Species

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  • Projects:
  • Every Word Was Once An Animal
  • Flicker
  • Mimetic Excess
  • S.C.O.L.D.
  • Becoming Colorful Becoming Warm
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  • Moth Moth
  • Middle Finger
  • Death Valley Wind
  • Utopia Distopia
  • Pollination Event
  • Teaching Aid
  • And Say
  • Your Nature
  • Snake Detection Theory
  • The Taste of Blue
  • R-RR-RRR-RRRR
  • Starting Over
  • Studio Mouse
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Ready to Hand

Plaster, Wood, tool dip, 2015​

The Middle Finger Project consists of performative sculptures that function as gestural artifacts. These performative tools draw attention to the arbitrariness of the sign, and to the ways in which meaning is constantly being performed and re-perormed. Riffing on Heidegger’s concepts of "tool being", “ready-to-hand,” and “present-at-hand," they draw attention to how we use language as though it were a tool, reaching for it reflexively as we would a hammer. The hammer (i.e., language, the sign) is transparent in the hammering. Once it is broken, it becomes “present at hand”: that is, we notice the sign itself rather than its function - precisely because it no longer works.
Middle Finger is a collaboration with Ted Toadvine, Philosophy, Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State.

Present-at-Hand

Plaster, Wood, tool dip, 2015​

Broken chain of signification.

Natural Sign

Plaster, Wood, tool dip, 2015​

Unnatural Sign

Plaster, Wood, tool dip, 2015​

This Means I'm Happy to See You

Plaster, Wood, tool dip, 2015​

Arbitrary Sign

Starting Over

Plaster, Wood, tool dip, 2015​

2 present to hand
3 natural orgins of the sign
4 unnatural origins of the sign
5 ambiguous origins of the sign b
6 starting over
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carlabengtson@icloud.com

© All Rights Reserved 2022

carlabengtson@icloud.com

© All Rights Reserved 2022