6 spring street
new york city 10012
tel: 212.219.0166
info@jenbekman.com

horacio salinas

statement

embedded 1998-2003

It's only a bottle cap, I thought, looking down at a speck of glitter under my feet; a bottle cap becoming something else as the ground devours it. New York City's streets are embedded with lost and discarded things: bottle caps, keys, and combs, rivet nails, sink chains, batteries, even jewelry. Flattened, pressed, ground into the tar, these stray objects make the pavement sparkle at night. It is the fertilizer of the city. These relics represent an archeological study of our everyday life.

Someone drank the bottle empty and threw the cap away. A clasp broke. Pockets with holes let a pen drop through, an overloaded garment cart spilled a hanger. How many cars have passed over it? Could one kneel and dig with bare hands and tear it out again? Who did it belong to?

Six years ago I moved my studio into Hell's Kitchen, a very industrial, gritty part of the city. Masses of people walk the streets, traffic is constant, and unusual scraps of trash are left in random places. All of these elements influenced the embedded project. Millions of years ago, when the earth was being born, a similar process was taking place, as living things became captured in time: flies caught in resin that became amber, animals caught in ooze that became rock. As those are clues to another world, so these relics represent what we in the twenty-first century are leaving behind today.