“What is your unit? There’s an atom, there’s an inch, there’s an hour, there’s a day, there’s a hand, there’s a year. What is your base unit? How do you build a language out of those units?” – Amy Sillman
This exhibition brings together students from Photography and New Media and Sound Art who approach the artwork as a structured aggregation of parts.
The exhibition takes as its premise that no image, body, or territory is apprehended outside of a system of measure. Units are not simply formal components; they are the operative standards through which value,
difference, and relation are organized.
A unit establishes equivalence and boundary. It determines what counts, what is divisible and what remains excess. To ask this question is therefore to ask how perception is structured in advance—by grids, binaries, documents, archives, repetitions and scales that appear natural but are historically produced.
The works gathered here approach the unit as both a minimal element and a regulatory device. They examine how systems of categorization stabilize gender, nation, authorship, land and institutional authority, and how repetition and seriality consolidate these structures over time.
Measurement is revealed not as neutral calibration but as a technology of normalization: it fixes identities into legible forms, converts lived experience into data and renders complex relations into comparable parts. Across
photography, video, and sound, the artists foreground the procedures—division, sequencing, coding, redaction, enlargement, accumulation—through which meaning is assembled and controlled.
Yet the exhibition does not simply expose these systems; it tests their limits. By isolating, repeating, exhausting or reconfiguring their chosen units, the artists introduce slippage into the very frameworks that organize recognition.
What appears fixed becomes provisional. What seems singular reveals itself as composite. What Is Your Unit? positions artistic practice as a site where the standards that structure perception can be identified, contested and recalibrated, insisting that every measure carries within it the possibility of being otherwise.
Participating Artists
- Railay Fawkes
- Freya Harding & Gray Parsons
- Keith Leo
- Parsa Malihipour
- Hana Mitchell
- Devin Pigeau
- Janice Tsai
- Rafael Zen