In this program the notion of the ‘object lesson’ is stripped of metaphor and returned to its original context as sensory observation (cultivated by British educator Elizabeth Mayo in the 19th Century in her texts Lessons on Objects and Lessons on Shells). The properties of objects and matter, along with their transformations through use value, are witnessed with exacting, revelatory attention. 

An arduous fishing technique, involving hand framed nets held steady by fisherfolk of the Solway estuary between England and Scotland (and dating back over a thousand years to the Viking Age), is brought to vivid life by its extant practitioners in Julie Parks’ and Heather Andrews’ Haaf (2020). Through a series of quotidian activities, patterns and relations emerge between forms of magic, pleasure, geometry, symbolism and labor. Sasha Pirker’s study of a lone Steinway grand piano (the tuner, 2023) subtly shifts from an inventory of its intricate making to that of its daunting maintenance under the fastidious care of a master tuner, his work seemingly never finished. The liminal space between body and machine is explored to acute visceral effect in Yuri Ancarani’s depiction of a robotic surgery administered by a human surgeon in Da Vinci (2012). Landforms (2024), by Laura Kraning, examines the geological strata where ancient fossils and consumer waste (in the form of microplastics) each reveal particularities of inhabitation - from once sea creatures to current land mammals - inscribed in the landscape. In The Mesh and the Circle (2014), by Portuguese directing duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, a pensive and playful interrogation occurs: can empirical knowledge of the object world be sponsored by the otherwise spectral nature of the moving image? The titular, sci-fi like ‘cold valley’ of Florian Fischer & Johannes Krell’s Kaltes Tal (2016) appears blanketed in a layer of fresh snow but is revealed, through patient observation of a mining operation, to be liming (an application to neutralize soil acidity in the forest through calcium and magnesium rich material). 

“The Way Things Go” is co-presented with the Tacoma Art Museum as part of “Elements: Material and Process in the Moving Image”, a film series curated for TAM Cinema by David Dinnell and Jay Kuehner and presented in dialogue with the TAM exhibition HAUNTED, curated by Ellen Ito.