About the exhibition:

cables hum and machines sing, drowning out other voices. money, messages, commands, desires, questions course through the wires. these machines are insatiable, drinking the water endlessly, thirsty from calculations, their sparks contained inside tentacles—a sea of comings and goings.

chewing on the wires is a jewelarae and ArtLab youth exhibition featuring conceptual sculptures and wearable artworks. this exhibition explores the physical infrastructures sustaining digital realms, tracing synthetic intimacies and machine mysticisms through objects that blur the boundaries between technology and the body. technomaterial—discarded electronic relics, decommissioned hard drives, scrapped conduit pipe, rock samples from abandoned mines, fragments from derelict buildings, reclaimed metal—are reconfigured to trace material memory, sedimentation, and residues left on skin. 

chunks of rock intersect machined aluminum, cast pewter, and silver to conjure an eerie kinship with machines and their infrastructures: these discarded objects are transformed into mutants—no longer entirely debris, tool, machine, jewelry, or body but some type of ever-evolving hybrid. 

the work imagines machines and materials as beings with appetites, memories, and relationships. it is silly to think that the apex of sentience is human. industrial infrastructures—wires and cables—are things extracted and processed: intensely transformed nature, disconnected from their origins but not severed from their spirits.

to play with jewelry means working in radical proximity: direct contact with skin that embeds an object into lived experience. precise boundaries become less certain, more difficult to locate. machine debris moves inside our flesh as our flesh rests on machine parts. dead skin cells catch between surfaces; microplastics swirl inside veins. the work sits somewhere in between, making it difficult to determine where one material body gives way to another.