Plots, Grids, Models
Kirkland Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Cambridge, MA
March 26 - April 11, 2026
Plots, Grids, Models pairs several paintings from the past several years with a collection of new sculptural objects that together explore the precipitating demands of digital infrastructure and its growing consumption of land, minerals, water, labor, and capital. The works cite the various cultural and material metabolic processes of image formation today: the rifts and loops of a world churning.
Occupying the floor of the gallery is a series of tanks, tubes, and pumps that explore the logics of industrial capitalism, its loops, and loops, and logics. Each container offers a metabolic quotation from some referent landscape. In one tank, bentonite drilling clay is recirculated as sediment; in another, copper is dissolved in an internal loop, then pumped over scrap iron objects in a cementation reaction that releases this copper for collection.
The project grounds itself in the material processes and chemical flows of Butte, Montana, a storied post-industrial town now home to an acidic lake of mine tailings. In an effort to secure a supply chain for rare earth elements used in digital infrastructure and defense technologies, the U.S. federal government has begun to reframe Butte's water bodies as geopolitical asset: latent pollution as a metal-rich orebody. As we begin to consume this second-order material, the model of extraction folds inward on itself, further entering its own synthetic space.