fields harrington: Economies of Breath
@ David Salkin Creative
1709 W Chicago Ave #2A, Chicago, IL, 60622
On view through Wednesday, December 23rd
The spirometer delivered systems of calculation and contributed to the racializing surveillance of statistical law. As a precision instrument, the spirometer is a knowledge-producing tool manufactured to develop value-free data, producing classification systems that monitor vital capacities to determine who can and cannot receive life insurance.
The knowledge that the spirometer produces cannot be divorced from risk-making practices carried out by life insurance companies that participate in the embedding of anti-blackness, classism, ableism, and cisheterosexism into the architecture of the device.
‘Economies of Breath’ examines modes of systematic knowledge that emerged in the 19th century, such as the invention of the spirometer, the discovery of entropy and conservation of energy, the institutionalization of statistics, and the research of fatigue. This knowledge contributed to the creation of ‘categories of difference’ and determined values of ‘vitality’.
The drawings in the exhibition illustrate entropic paths carried out by the spirometer that construct historical scientific practices grounded in racist-eugenic logic. They map the routes taken by structural systems of power —such as the health insurance industry and sanitary commissions supported by the government— and fund the creation of various forms of bias.
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fields harrington (b. 1986) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism, and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. The weaving of artistic and scientific languages deployed in his work proposes the formation of a relational knowledge that recodes science through poetics. harrington completed the Whitney Independent Studio Program in 2020 and received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019.
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Tags: Chicago, david salkin, David Salkin Creative, fields harrington, West Town
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