Brett Wallace
With, IF THIS THEN WHAT, Wallace has laser cut anodyne statements cut into cardboard shipping boxes to expose a glitch where the ad space on the box may have been hijacked in the production process. Wallace sent laser cut boxes to direct locations where the USPS shipping process transformed them by the physical markings they collected. In this way, he expands the audience of the work questions where art exists in the dominant culture. In his installations and relief sculptures Wallace references technological growth and entropy, information containment and storage, and interface design from Instagram to Pac-Man. His process ingests information found in Internet web pages and pushes it through laser cutters or computer numerical control (CNC) machines to physically cut material from information. In a series of videos, he leverages open source code to convert Raspberry Pi devices into video loopers of assembled footage from distribution centers to motorcycle crashes. The devices frame information as a commodity and raise questions about the risk and spectacle involved in cultural production.
