Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Our work revolves around objects and processes that extend themselves across time and through the vastness of logistical space. We work collaboratively to make site-adapted videos, installations, sculptures, and drawings, often reacting to architectural or infrastructural elements hidden in plain sight. Most of our works, in one way or another, are documented performances, in which we lodge materiality, voice, intimacy, and at times our own bodies, into the heart of abstract and technologically produced systems. In recent years, we’ve focused our gaze on the objects, processes, and myths that participate in property, possession, infrastructure, and archive—generally, the spaces where the categories of “private” and “public” are deployed against one another, often under the aegis of technology. Working collaboratively, we find that we can challenge these official worlds, in their often violent banality; collectively we can act within, speak to, and hold things and contexts that are otherwise too weighted, too sprawling, or too slippery with history, to encounter alone.

marissaleebenedict.com
davidrueter.com

While at Headlands

Building on currents in our previous works—such as “Dark Fiber” (2014-2023), “Department of Water and Power” (2018), and “Metrica” (2023)—we will spend our time at the Headlands energetically producing drawings, videos, and test pieces for future installations. Digging at the infrastructural semiotics of the Western settlement of the US, and California in particular, we will be thinking and moving along the lengths of the coastlines of California, Oregon, and Washington, tracing things erased and things inscribed. We plan to visit “Drake’s Plate of Brass”—a forged plaque from the 1930s meant to be the original marker placed by Drake as he claimed the Pacific Coast of North America in 1597—where it hangs in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. We plan to work with manuscripts, papers, and images from the library’s archives as we build a site-adapted body of work.