Mixed-Media Assemblage

Overview

Looking (Distributed) is an interactive installation composed of fifteen open Altoids tins arranged in a five-by-three grid across a standing table. Each container holds a single object or photograph drawn from the artist’s archive: personal artifacts, collected materials, small keepsakes, fragments of daily life, and Instax photographs documenting different vantage points throughout the exhibition. Individually, each tin functions as a discrete container of meaning. Together, they become a distributed archive that can only be understood through movement, accumulation, and attention.

The work asks the viewer to slow down. Rather than taking in the installation as a single image, the viewer opens—or peers into—each container one at a time, constructing an understanding through sequence rather than spectacle. Every object serves as evidence of a lived history while remaining intentionally incomplete on its own. Meaning is produced through the act of looking and the relationship that develops between one container and the next.

Installed adjacent to a larger wall-based assemblage documenting the artist’s visual language and personal ephemera, Looking (Distributed) extends EZRA’s methodology into three-dimensional space. The Altoids tin becomes a repeatable architectural unit capable of holding memory, documentation, and narrative without hierarchy. Throughout the practice, the tin functions as a standardized vessel through which different forms of information can be archived, preserved, and reauthored.

The work demonstrates one of the central principles of EZRA: that meaning does not reside within a single object, but emerges through sustained observation across many small encounters. The containers distribute the archive physically across the tabletop while simultaneously asking the viewer to gather it mentally into a single narrative.

Metadata

Artist
Seth / Ezra Dager

Year
2026

Medium
Mixed-Media Assemblage

Status
Complete

Archive
Human Archive

Location
The Rigley Field

Components
Fifteen open Altoids tins containing Instax photographs, personal artifacts, found objects, textiles, keepsakes, printed matter, and collected ephemera arranged across a standing wooden table.