Jacob C Hammes
Meeting of the Servants of the Collective Imagination
vinyl text
dimensions variable
2023
In Meeting of the Servants of the Collective Imagination, a vinyl text wrapping the room moves around the space horizontally and vertically, dodging sculptures and veering towards the gallery’s architectural features to invite a sense of disorientation or dizziness. Drawing from research gathered for Summit and Valley, the text is composed of edits or creative reinterpretations of the last ten years of G20 “Leaders Declarations,” a public document penned by the attendees of the yearly summit that describes their unified commitments to the parts of human life that are identified as needing improvement.
Through various processes both automated and manual, Hammes attempts to revise, renovate, and divorce the language of international neoliberalism from the source documents in favor of declarations focused on collective thought: impassioned, Utopian, absurd, and leaving intact some of the nonsensical artifacts generated by the process of writing a manifesto through automation. To engage, viewers must focus their eyes upon parts of the gallery space that often receive little attention: baseboards, light fixtures, window frames, and thermostats all become part of the work. The viewer is enveloped inside a sculptural architectural installation, which raises questions on the experience of being led through a space without knowing what kind of ideological hailing they might be participating in.