One Work: Joshua Moreno

Structure of Things, 2020, mixed media installation, Ice Gallery, San Diego. Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A floor-bound installation in a gallery space. The room has white walls and an arched window on the right. The back wall bears a layered gray drawing, which mirrors the window. The installation, which occupies a rectangular space on the floor, is made up of a dense assortment of small items: slender pieces of wood, tubes, pebbles, and many other bits and bobs.]

Over the course of two months, Joshua Moreno collected objects from around San Diego’s Bread & Salt building. A former bread factory, it is now a complex of galleries, artist studios, and offices, but plentiful scraps of its previous life remain. Moreno also ambled through the surrounding Logan Heights neighborhood, carefully combing its sidewalks and alleyways. Both natural and human-made, the stuff he found piled up to serve as raw material for a new artwork, Structure of Things. The work appears in Moreno’s exhibition, Everything is Temporary, at Ice Gallery, a small space within Bread & Salt dedicated to site-specific installations. The show also features an elaborate wall drawing that provides a home for the floor-bound sculptural piece.

Structure of Things draws the viewer in, gently inviting examination over a sustained period of time. While at first it might look like a mere itemization of the detritus in Moreno’s environment, its intricacy unfolds with close looking. I found myself slowly walking back and forth, often crouching down to look at each meticulously placed piece from different angles. Viewing the installation is a process of surprise, at the unexpected objects included and the precision with which the work was made, which only fully dawned on me over time. It is tempting to compare Structure of Things to all kinds of references. An architectural model à la The Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum. An artist trying to reign in studio clutter. The play of an industrious and obsessive kid. Although Moreno’s installation is diminutive in scale, there is just so much here and the mind runs wild with associations.

What it is most like, for me, is a poem. Moreno has perhaps the most attuned sensitivity toward arrangement of any artist I know. And what is a poem but the careful arrangement of words? The poet weighs each one: its dictionary definition, its emotional implications, its aural inflection, how all of this might shift when one word is placed near another. These words, and everything they contain, build upon each other to create meaning. The poet pays meticulous attention to structure, but at the core of the poem always lies intuition.

For Moreno, found objects are his words. Each one has a history, has lived a life of different uses and contexts, but every object takes on a refreshed existence in his distinct configuration. Structure of Things is like an epic poem, a genre famous for its fantastic and lengthy tales, usually set in the past. Moreno’s installation is epic for its sheer number of materials and its exhaustive detail. Ordinary things become extraordinary as he arranges them into a new story.  It is also like a lyric poem, a type known for expressing emotion, often told in the first person. I find that the intention with which the relationships between things are composed transports me into Moreno’s perspective, and I see the care and tenderness in his practice. The process of looking elicits these same feelings in me.

Within this limited space, Moreno has been able to craft a visual and emotional experience that is both intimate and sweeping in its expanse. Like a good poem, the work lives in my memory for a long time after first encountering it. I return to it over and over in my mind, the small gestures having called me to cultivate the characteristics I want to practice in my own life. 

— Elizabeth Rooklidge, Editor, HereIn

Structure of Things, 2020, mixed media installation, Ice Gallery, San Diego. Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A view of the installation from above. It is arranged in a tidy rectangle and straddles two different flooring materials: concrete on the left and red brick on the right. From this view, we see the intricate order to its composition, all parallel lines, criss-crossing diagonals, and squares. It is made up of slim pieces of metal and wood, photographic sides, empty film reels, cardboard tubes, metal machinery parts, lights, rocks, and plant material. Together, they create a palette of brown, gray, silver, and white, with hints of green.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A close-up view, slightly from above, of the installation’s center.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A close-up, side view of the installation.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A view from above of one corner of the installation, which extends into the image from the top edge.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A close-up view from above of a long metal object extending over the red brick floor.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Joshua Moreno

[Image description: Another close-up, side view of the installation.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Joshua Moreno

[Image description: A close-up view from above of a section of the installation with small white objects arranged on wood strips.]

Structure of Things (detail), Photo: Michael James Armstrong

[Image description: A close-up view, slightly from above, of a section with red tiles, wood, and plant material.]

Structure of Things, 2020, mixed media installation, Ice Gallery, San Diego. Photo: Joshua Moreno

[Image description: A wide view of the installation in the gallery, from the perspective of the viewer crouching down.]