Seth Lower – Units

Units contains photographs taken from 1994–2017. The images depict a variety of everyday materials and situations, many seen in sets, parts, or multiples. Within such scenes, Lower seeks out a kind of integrity (or lack thereof): standards of measurement, materiality, vague questions about the boundaries of entities and experience. A sign swallowed by tree bark, a small collection of funnels, a stove for sale in the sunshine. Where does one unit end and the other begin? It is certainly possible to be part of the whole and at the same time separate, existing with a foot in both worlds, but does this say anything about the units themselves, or only the way we define them? Graham Harman writes that such pieces are ‘terminal points, closed-off neighborhoods that retain their local identity despite the broader systems into which they are partly absorbed’.