ALPHABET OF SITES
Jessica Martin
2024 Summer Residency
Alphabet of Sites, a collaborative piece by Jessica Martin and Matt Olson (OOIEE), is a series of land art installations that translate architectural elements of a site into the landscape. This project transforms photographs of a site’s infrastructure—its details, contours, and shadows cast by buildings—into an abstract language of lines through existing emergent shapes. Initially captured from a vertical perspective, these shapes are transposed to the horizontal plane through various installations, scaling from architectural to urban magnitudes. Drawing inspiration from Robert Smithson’s notion of the underground boring, as explored in his essay "A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not," suggests that all components of a site—bricks, pavement, holes, mounds, heaps, paths, ditches, roads, and terraces—possess intrinsic aesthetic value. Alphabet of Sites embraces this perspective, reimagining these details as part of a visual language that articulates the discrete elements of shape and form within the island's infrastructure.The project explores using sight and site as material, identifying the aliveness of these elements. The process follows improvisations of fragments, and the repetitive nature of sampling, allowing and inviting the original elements to evolve, erode, and become distortions, traces, shadows of themselves.
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