Built from Below

Color Reduction Woodcut

Printmaking

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2017

Built from Below — Statement

Built from Below examines the vertical logic through which power, value, and visibility are organized.

What occupies the upper register of a social structure often appears autonomous, complete, and self-sustaining. Yet this apparent stability is contingent upon forces that remain structurally displaced from view. “Below” therefore functions less as a geographical position than as a condition: a field of expenditure, repetition, and material support upon which circulation and continuity depend.

The work is concerned with this asymmetry between visibility and necessity. What is most visible is not necessarily what is most fundamental; what appears to command a system may in fact be sustained by that which the system renders anonymous.

In this sense, Built from Below treats support not as passivity, but as latent agency. The work shifts the question of power away from ownership and representation toward the deeper question of what, and whom, allows a structure to remain operative at all.