Past exhibition: fields harrington

Past exhibition: fields harrington

In the last few years, the Brooklyn-based artist fields harrington has interrogated the history and applications of technology and its relation to race, class and gender. For his online show at Wagner’s Union Gallery, harrington shares work from his series, “Black Secret Technology” (2019), “What Remains Constant” (2020) and “Steam Economies” (2021).

In “Black Secret Technology,” harrington asks, what and who have been left out of the dominant narrative of invention? With a specific interest in the underrepresentation of people of color, he creates a series of drawings that replicate the original patents submitted by long-forgotten or largely unknown inventors.

In “Steam Economies,” harrington focuses on one of these inventors, the late Norbert Rillieux (1806–1894), who recognized that the economy of steam could be produced through the recurrence of latent heat in steam and vapors. Rillieux created a more efficient way of evaporating sugar cane juice that was also markedly safer than prior forms of extraction, reliant on slave labor. But, as harrington notes, “the workers who operated the Sugar Train method are not entirely liberated through Rilliuex’s invention.” harrington both recognizes Rillieux’s contribution to knowledge and technology and his uneasy position in the Antebellum South through a diptych that foregrounds his contributions through the formula for “latent heat” that he applied, superimposed over his likeness, which reminds us of his own complex legacy; the accompanying image references an erasure from history.

“What Remains Constant” takes as its point of departure the 19th century invention of the spirometer, a tool designed by an insurance company to test the lung capacity of members of the British working class and thus the degree of risk associated with their insurance policies. The works from this series illustrate what harrington calls “the social implications of [how] the science of work, the invention of the spirometer,” among others, “contributed to categories of difference and determined values of ‘vitality’ with the use of measurements of capacity.”

— Philip Cartelli, Wagner College Gallery


“Multiple Effect Evaporator — Norbert Rillieux” (Ink on newsprint, 2019)

 


“Breathing Device — G.A. Morgan” (Ink on newsprint, 2019)


“Electrical Resistor and method of making the same — Otis F. Boykin” (Ink on newsprint, 2019)


“Electroacoustic transducer — James E. West” (Ink on newsprint, 2019)


“Steam Economies” (Privacy filter, inkjet print, 2021)


“Steam Economies” (Privacy filter, inkjet print, 2021)


“The Value of an Individual” (Digital C-print, 2020)


“The Regulation of Fitness” (Digital C-print, 2020)


“The Value of an Individual” (Digital C-print, 2020)


About fields harrington

fields harrington (b. 1986, Sacramento, California, based in Brooklyn, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers the blurring of boundaries between poetics and science. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the Black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. The weaving of artistic and scientific languages deployed in his work proposes the formation of a relational knowledge that recodes science through poetics. fields received his BFA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Studio Program (2019-20).