Against the history of natural phenomena, and their collusion in shaping our planet, human interventions maintain a remarkably brief tenure. Our alterations to landmass, the extraction of re-sources, domestication and consumption of organic precincts, and the development of technological regimes, seem like modest amendments compared to the shaping of mountains or the drifting of oceans.

The substances of the world exist in fixed quantities, with only the possibility of being redistributed, recomposed, or transfigured through time. Controlled Substances explores the syntax of matter, and acts of human transfiguration that bring the physical inventory of the world into and out of being.

The sculptures in this exhibition function like assignations of organic and inorganic transformation, measuring intractable rates of change, in much the same way that a thawing river can be registered alongside an animal decomposing on its shoal. Materials range from the telluric to the ersatz; brass oxidizes, hair sheds, dried vegetation desiccates or decays, acrylic yellows.

In "A Single Origin With Plural Effects" (a title which plays on the writing of Roland Barthes from his essay on plastic) a curved brass rod seems to transform a garland of fish scales into a cascade of un-painted acrylic nails; denoting that the processes of transformation are phenomenal, directional, unrepeatable, and irreversible—but also largely unseen—occurring beyond the reach of human perception because we are not sufficiently patient, sensitive, or immortal enough to bear witness to “the conversion of substance” that happens across geological, biological, and technological time-scales. As a body of work, the sculptures that compose Controlled Substances refuse anchorage in time, slipping from the assurances of physical permanence.