Lost in Things

Gearbox Gallery is pleased to present the special exhibition, Lost In Things, in the Inner Room by Kathleen King. Kathleen King gathers detritus from city streets, natural objects collected over years of adventuring, and items culled from her domestic environment. As in a derivé, the psychogeographic game of wandering without purpose or destination, King’s willfully marginal sets of objects are arranged in meandering sequences. 

Inhabitants of large cities like Oakland share precarious social realities. Late-capitalist power systems construct and deconstruct our built environment relentlessly. Our desiring bodies move through physical spaces that obstruct and direct us. We live in relationship to each other within this contemporary urban milieu; in streets, tents, vehicles, encampments, shops, markets, apartments and homes, prisons and high-rises. As systems exploit and discard us, Lost In Things, arranges discarded objects to ask the questions,

"What are we made of, what connects us, what do we need?"

Lost In Things is a poem. Created specifically for the Gearbox Inner Room, the installation uses the whole space as the work. Comprised of discarded objects sourced from city streets with new material gleaned from streets surrounding the gallery, this assemblage finds ways to reflect and deflect. Playing with the reflexivity between matter and language, objects correlate on the walls like words on a page. Viewers will assemble their own poems.

Lost In Things is a broken grid. The composition is based on the dimensions of the floor and walls of the Inner Room. Modernist systems of order are broken down using improvisational processes inspired by street populations, and a handmade methodology that directly registers and transmits the subjective.

Lost In Things is a territory. This iteration loosens and flows into a derive-like wander reminiscent of Situationist mapping. The specific objects gleaned provide further connections and disjunctions.

This immersive installation presents an unclassifiable construction reflecting the chaos, generativity and dignity of street life in the current age. The centering and display of marginal objects gathered from the waste stream rouses potential, encourages the discovery of new meanings in habitual ways of seeing, and supports an active response to the poetic and political situations of our time.