MISSION 17 presents Amidst the Ruins, an exhibition of new works by Val Britton, Michael Damm and Zachary Royer Scholz, which explore the relationship between creativity and destruction. What motivates us to disassemble or destroy things? Why is it fun to deface? How does violence transform our relationships to objects? And what does it reveal about their mechanisms and meanings? Works by these three artists ruin the surfaces of objects to expose their constitutive materials, to thematize the contexts in which they appear, and to turn them towards new ends.

Val Britton creates immersive collages with large sheets of slashed paper that approximate and, in the process, reinvent the language of maps. She overwhelms the surfaces of the paper with the violence of her cutting, and the ensuing tears spill out of the sheets to produce objects that occupy a liminal space between two and three dimensions. The results look something like maps drawn with blades, but they depict the performance of their own production and the impulses that informed them, rather than any merely objective terrain.

Michael Damm's photographs and videos present amalgams of desolate imagery, which are both documentary and psychological. He explores the work of devastation and decay in urban environments, and his discoveries evoke mnemonic associations that resonate with unanticipated meanings.

And Zachary Royer Scholz tears up and reconstructs pieces of furniture and elements of architecture. In the process he finds new significance in their materials and reveals a shifting flow of meanings beneath the otherwise statically defined frameworks of our involvements.

The figures of destruction produced by these artists articulate and explore our situation between birth and death, and presents these poles not merely as opposites, but rather as complicated and mutually integral to processes of creation.

- Taro Hattori