RTS would like to welcome our August/September resident Kristine Eudey, an artist living in Oakland, California. Most often, she uses photographic representations as the starting point for her work, exploring the tensions that exists within the elastic function of an image. Her work also takes the form of installation and text-based projects that act as meditations on the contingency of meaning in our representational language, and how the control of that language acts in producing relationships to the visible.
During her time at RTS, Eudey will work towards a book iteration of the ongoing project Register Star. Since 2012 Eudey has been photographing between the Midwest and the west coast, interested in the ways conquest and freedom are tied up in movement and our relationship to land and space. The work stems from a town in Illinois which was once the largest hardware manufacturing center in the United States. In contemporary times the industry has experienced a hollowing out, except for certain specialized and not-yet-elsewhere produced parts. The dematerialization of value-production that comes with the shift from manufacturing to service sits alongside a continual sprawl moving over the land. In this town a machine shop produces wares for military and private defense clients. This includes NASA, to whom they supplied the gear mechanisms for the rover Curiosity, currently exploring Mars. Starting from this shop, Eudey investigates the reality of human work alongside the mythology and spectacle to which these concrete efforts serve. At the core of her investigation is the human relationship to physical space and how photographic representation has expanded and irrevocably shifted our visual capacity within that relationship, producing a condition of abstracted and infinite views.
This work will be combined with an associated piece called The Tenuous Distance, to be release as a set of two books – one image based and the other text.