GATHERING

JASON LORD
March 4 through April 10
Opening reception, this Friday, March 4th, 6-9pm

Jason Lord has walked thousands of miles since the beginning of the pandemic; miles a day,
every day, regardless of weather or general mood. On the way, he has collected flotsam and
jetsam of a peripheral world. These are places that people deem worthy of nothing more than
trash, but for Jason, those cast-off items, retrieved from street gutters and stretches of railroad
track, provide an opportunity for intimate connection and aesthetic rebirth.

ARTIST STATEMENT
I have walked 5600 miles since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. March 10th will mark
two years–731 consecutive days–of walking at least five miles, regardless of weather,
temperature, workload, or mood. As I walk, I look, listen, and gather: thoughts, sounds,
images, and objects. I notice, pick up, and observe rusted railroad equipment, springs and
joints, hardware, little flags and tiny glass bottles, a handle grip, a skateboard wheel. Some of
these objects were simply abandoned– obsolete cogs in a progress machine–and others were
expelled: tossed out of a stolen backpack, or hurled from a speeding baby stroller. Some may
be fugitives, liberating themselves from an abused chassis on a pot-holed street. These objects
tell us stories and ask us questions about impermanence, value, and materiality.

The gathering ritual is about witnessing the discarded, about reclamation and resurrection, but
mostly, this work is about compassion. To engage in compassion for something or someone,
we first bear witness to them. We acknowledge something or someone as a piece of a complex
world with validity, purpose, and potential. Compassion is a practice. As we build capacity for
it–to witness a rusted-out tailpipe and give it new life as an act of love–we can exercise it on
other things and other people. These are icons for a new world; saints of empathy,
understanding, and compassion, with their haloes emanating as sound gathered as field
recordings. Their message: that anything can be treated with tenderness–even a jagged and
corroded crowbar or disintegrating mitten; even the imperfect, the outmoded, the discardable;
even you and me, even on our worst days.
– JL