enmeshed (2021)



Photo by Polina Teif

Darian Razdar / 2021
From Indelible Discards (BUNKER 2 at Xpace)


Ink on cotton fabric and paper. Monotype printes created using salvaged industrial cardboard. 

Works featured in Indelible Discards, a group show curated by BUNKER 2 at Xpace (Toronto, 2022). From BUNKER 2’s exhibition essay:

“Waste is contingent, a material record of other, more favorable items andactivities. In The Ethics of Waste (2006), Hawkins describes containers and packaging as “transitional objects”: even before their singular purpose is fulfilled, they already look like the garbage they will inevitably become, occupying a liminal category of soon-to-be-waste. The value of packing materials is dependent on their function that preserves the utility of the items they enclose. In the multimedia print series Enmeshed, Darian Razdar reconsiders the temporality of cardboard packing mesh. With a sheet of this honeycomb-patterned material salvaged from a roadside trash pile, the artist created multichromatic impressions of its texture on fabric and paper. In its first pressing, theink is highly saturated, while in subsequent pressings the ink becomes increasingly faint.

Razdar layered dozens of pressings using this mesh until it eventually deteriorated. This process reveals the ephemerality of this ‘disposable’ material, while the resultant prints create an enduring archive of its likeness. In the creation of this work, the cardboard packing mesh undergoes a transference from the actual to the representational, anaesthetic afterlife suggesting both transience and permanence.”


Photo by Polina Teif


Photo by Polina Teif


Photo by Polina Teif

Photo by Darian Razdar

Photo by Darian Razdar
Mark