A human(e) matter is an umbrella concept comprised of performances, objects and videos concerned with global capital’s alienating effects on our consciousness through materiality and labor. With humor, pathos and an interest in craft and industrial production, this project forms parafictions that are absurd and dead serious. Jeanine Oleson is working with an ensemble in live performances and videos that enact compositions based on the idea of conduction that is material, musical, and social and referencing experimental music, physical labor and speech acts. A recent 3D video and related objects also focused on material transformation of copper and clay, troubling how images and sound are made and transmitted. An upcoming iteration includes a new video, performance, musical instruments, glass, weavings and images about absurdist production cycles and abstracted materiality. The video, shot in caves and mines in New Mexico, will follow a production cycle of copper into a wire factory and into a power grid.

Jeanine Oleson premiered her project at the Hammer Museum in 2017.