Sedimentary Noise looks at what controls us and how we strive to identify the socio-political implications of power within the constructs of the human condition. Touching the power and limits of the will, Sedimentary Noise references Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, in which the central character sinks deeper and deeper into a mound of earth, resisting suffocation – an allegory for human endurance and persistence. Made at a time of historic drought in California, the title refers to a sound-imaging method of calculating changes in lake levels.

Although Beckett’s Winnie cries out wearily, she also expresses the playwright’s admiration of our durability: “That is what I find so wonderful. The way man adapts himself. To changing conditions.” As with Beckett’s character, we question this predicament – an allegory for the ways in which humans endure and persist through daily challenges, a mediated existence, and the encroaching sands of time.

Installation view from Root Division Gallery, San Francisco