Dave Hullfish Bailey's latest installation employs a now-familiar sculptural language: industrial and domestic objects arranged in a purposeful yet idiosyncratic chaos that bespeaks mad scientist or eccentric hobbyist. Titled Ditch/School, it's reminiscent of the early, semi-functional installations of Jason Rhoades, although decidedly less hedonistic. Instead, what emerges amid the jumble of worktables, C-clamps, sawhorses and milk crates is a subtle underlying order—a correspondence between natural processes and mechanical or scientific ones that Bailey proceeds to quietly dismantle.

An offshoot of his continued engagement with alternative notions of community and ecology, Ditch/School was inspired by a makeshift library in Slab City, a squatter community in California's environmentally devastated Imperial Valley. The library, a remarkable example of vernacular architecture, appears in a series of small black and white images lining the walls. As viewers make their way around the room, the images reveal a Frankensteinian structure that is part tree, part salvage and almost entirely open air. It's a wonderfully quixotic incarnation of the free flow of information, but it's also a lonely, desolate outpost.

Flows, or the lack thereof are the unifying theme of the rest of the installation, which consists of three improvisational structures. One is a kind of mechanical landscape, whose main component is a descending row of metal trays. Perched atop a collapsed ladder supported by white plastic buckets, each tray is filled with a different kind of soil. The top tray contains a pebbly mixture through which water flows and appears to empty through a tube into the second tray, which holds a finer silt. The third and final tray is filled with dry sand. A first, the structure seems like a mechanical illustration of the process of erosion, but closer inspection reveals that the trays are in fact unconnected. Each is a self-contained system that cycles back only upon itself, thwarting our desire for a familiar environmental narrative. This inoperative diorama suggests the deficiencies of a scientific understanding of nature, but its provisional construction also reminds us that such frameworks are themselves continually subject to rearrangement.

The ideological component of Bailey's endeavor becomes clearer in the installation's second structure, a cluttered workstation, complete with its own small library and photocopier. Bailey has copied selected pages from the books—on subjects ranging from seeds and soil to the Colorado desert and, improbably, Rietveld furniture—and casually affixed them to the structure's metal surfaces with magnets. This process of excerpting and re-presenting information highlights the biases inherent in all forms of information. For example, a map of irrigation patterns takes on new meaning in light of the blocked flows of water and dirt in the neighboring structure; it's an example of the single-minded agricultural development that filled the Imperial Valley with toxic runoff. Yet such editorializing is also hopeful. By recontextualizing erstwhile "neutral" information, Bailey reveals not only how meaning is made, but also how it might be constructed differently.

For although environmental concerns are central to his project, Bailey's true subject is how information circulates, amasses and pools to form a kind of ideological bedrock. His funky, rambling installation subtly suggests that the foundations of our scientific, profiteering outlook have been shaped by the same negligence that wreaked environmental havoc in the Imperial Valley. Despite its voguish look, Ditch/School's workroom aesthetic is perhaps an antidote to this mindless sedimentation: there's nothing "natural" about it, and it can't help but acknowledge its own construction. Further, by conflating this aesthetic with the fabrication of ideological systems, Bailey also encourages us to participate in building a different landscape, whether out of dirt or ideas.

This review originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Artweek.

< back to art