SI Offsite | Cooper Jacoby: Discorgers

The ‘gargoyle’, a grotesque architectural feature, takes its name from the old French gargouille, meaning ‘throat’ or ‘gullet’. 

Many traditional gargoyle forms are drawn from pagan and mythological symbols, domesticated in Europe by the Christianity around the period of the Black Death as avatars of unexplainable social or biological terror.

Now most commonly associated with religious buildings from the European Middle Ages, these depictions of evil, fearsome, repulsive or comedic creatures made their way into the designs of institutional buildings and seats of power such as universities during the Gothic revival.

For Disgorgers, these sculptures are tied together in an installation with a systemic logic of crisis, emergency and exhaustion, and emit a range of vapors, temperatures and sounds from their chorus of mouths.

In the first area, sculptures play a collection of recorded telephone hold music, while light fixtures are modified to overheat expired fluorescent bulbs, causing the mercury calcified at their ends to glow like candles and flicker in a state of perpetual limbo. 

This is contrasted with sets of emergency operations in the second room that kick into action when systems fail.

A backup generator powers the machinic gargoyle sculptures and highlights a tenuous relationship to infrastructure and totemic fears of its absence.