Sculpture and the Object

"Even now, it doesn't matter to him so much which of his works are realized, in the physical, and which remain virtual. Both, to him, are objects, completed works. They are just said in different ways, enunciated using two separate dialects. (…) For him, the virtual was never a critique or evasion of the actual. Virtual and actual were always one and the same."
— Travis Jeppesen, Revenge of the Spheres, text for About, Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2012 (full text; excerpt on harm.work)

How the Assemblages began

The artist tells the origin on the series page. Shortly after art school he and his friends saw most exhibitions as photographs on sites like Contemporary Art Daily, "pristine spaces with perfectly realised works". He rendered exhibitions in 3D software such as Cinema 4D and posted the renders to see whether the blogs would feature them beside the real installation views. "The idea worked a little too well. A gallerist in London saw the images online and she liked them. Thinking they were IRL works, she asked if she could show them." He could admit they had no physical dimension or build them, and he built them:

"The works are spheres, the easiest shapes to create digitally. It's three clicks, assigning an image as a texture on a sphere and then making adjustments. To make the same shape in physical material is among the hardest things you can do."

The surfaces were "images from Google image searches - mostly textures from ready-made render kits", chosen because they "represented complex systems, network cables, intestines, whatever I could find that was interlocking and complex". In his words the works "became sculptures about the ways in which systems fit together, interpenetrate, and elude each other. The sphere is a kind of container, but also a fixed border."

Three-dimensional work did not start here. Showreel (2009) is an object of acrylic glass, spray paint and lacquer, 66 × 66 × 66 cm, and the Redux works of 2009 are hand-cut movie posters with plastic and spray paint (Free, New Museum, 2010; → Free).

The form

The harm.work medium page describes the method: "Three-dimensional work I build by cutting flat printed sheets and joining them into a volume, rather than by modelling or casting. The image is made on screen and printed before anything is cut, so the surface exists before the form does." In practice an Assemblage is a set of long curved strips of transparent synthetic glass or PETG, each UV-printed (the earliest ones digitally silkscreened, 636) and sometimes spray-painted, bent into overlapping rings and riveted where they cross. The result is an open sphere you can see straight through, hung on thin cables. The strips come apart, so the works ship flat (1035). Sizes run from 40 cm (627, 2011) to about 120 cm (1290, 2013); most are 70–100 cm.

Assemblage (canvas) hangs on two wires against a white ground. Its grey strips carry the printed weave of a scanned canvas and cross one another in loose loops, so the far side of the sphere shows through the gaps.

The titles name the surface:

harm.work catalogues six of these; the notes hold more, several of them untitled (e.g. 627, 636–638, 782, 990, 1290). Everything vs. anything is UV-printed on PET-G (1301; confirmed by the artist, November 2026), not the acrylic glass of a former harm.work entry; 1290 gives its size as 120 × 100 × 110 cm, the former entry 110 × 110 cm. The stock photo carried a Dreamstime watermark (the file is in 1287) and, after enlargement, the watermark of an unregistered PhotoZoom Pro 5; he left the protective foil on (1301).

Assemblage (shell) hangs low over a concrete floor. One strip ends in a disc printed with an ammonite; a yellow band and grey bands printed with stones and shells loop round it, joined by small rivets. The same work hung in Loomer, Los Angeles, 2015 (Loomer).

About (Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2012)

The artist calls About "My very first real solo exhibition." The show, the framed collages, Jeppesen's full text and the press it received are on About (Wilkinson Gallery, 2012). harm.work catalogues four works: Untitled (collage with hands) (2012), Assemblage (chain) (2012, 100 × 100 × 100 cm), Assemblage (shell) and Assemblage (canvas) (both 2011).

The installation view shows more than the catalogue: four strip spheres hanging at different heights, the largest an X of two broad bands, the one on the right printed with chain links, and two framed triptychs on the walls, one of them with the drawn hands.

In Assemblage (chain) a wide band printed with heavy steel chain links forms the lower ring; a brown band above carries a block of flat colour fields, and clear strips arc between them.

Travis Jeppesen wrote Revenge of the Spheres for the gallery. His text reads the sculptures as the physical side of a position the online work had already taken: the virtual and the actual are "one and the same", works "just said in different ways". It ends: "Conjure a body-mind machine, mattering itself into objects. The art object is a thing that is permitted to simultaneously be something else. Many things at once, that thing."

The Assemblage works travelled on. 1035 is a draft checklist for Release Early, Release Often (Abrons Arts Center, New York, 2013): it lists Assemblage (About reviews and press), (canvas), (shell) and (armor) with their locations ("Wilkinson, London", "UtahMoca, ships flat"), and marks shell and armor "I'd prob rather not show it", since they might not fit "the curatorial premise of recursion and self-referentiality" (→ Release Early, Release Often). Assemblage (About) went to I Was Raised on the Internet (MCA Chicago, 2018) and, with Assemblage (new), to Pattern & Presence (Upstream Gallery Amsterdam, 2018).

At NIMK one sphere of clear strips lay on a black floor among scattered aluminium door stops; 685 calls it "Sculptures with doorstoppers". The note is undated beyond "added over 14 years ago", about 2011–12.

Studies and models (2013)

The seven "new sculptures" shape drawings of 2013 (1272–1277) are loose ink and crayon drawings. This one outlines a lumpy, bag-like volume with a crumpled top, shaded in rough strokes, with small faces drawn into it.

The first model is a small sphere of translucent strips spray-painted yellow, orange, red and blue, with wet paint still visible where the strips overlap. It lies on grey card.

Readings

Jeppesen (2012). The sculptures as the same objects as the online works, "said in different ways" (above).

Object-oriented ontology. Earlier versions of this page read the Assemblages through object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman's The Quadruple Object, 2011; Levi Bryant's The Democracy of Objects, 2011; Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, 2012; Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, 2013). No note, text or interview says the artist read these books. The reading also leaned on the claim that the spheres are sealed and withdraw from view, which the works contradict: they are open and see-through. It is set aside here.

What the archive does attest. Two texts sit beside the sculptures in the notes. 639 copies Manuel DeLanda on the identity of an assemblage: singular individuals that "often belong to a population of more or less similar assemblages", which fits a series of one-off spheres made by one recurring procedure (→ Assemblage Identity, the canonical page for this reading). 1266 copies Leland de la Durantaye's summary of Giorgio Agamben's "profane order", in which the distinctions between sacred and profane, exception and norm, singular and universal "are neutralized": they "continue to exist" but lose "the divisive force they carry today". The note names no source and does not connect itself to the sculptures; it is linked from 996 (Very Beta Still) and works of 2013.

Enning (2022). A decade after About, Nora Enning's curatorial essay for Context Switch (Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin) treats the distinction between "the digital" and "the supposedly tangible" as no longer contemporary (→ Context Switch).

The wiki's reading. Two things link the sculptures to the generative work. The surface is made on screen and printed before the form exists, and the form follows the print. The making stays visible: rivets, spray paint, the foil left on, the watermark of unregistered software on everything vs. anything. The series is also a population in DeLanda's sense, each sphere singular, all made by one procedure, as the Markov palettes and the Mutant Garden offspring are (→ Process Legibility, Markov's Dream Palette, Evolutionary Logic).

The are.na reference field

The artist's are.na channel assemblages (opened 27 February 2017, 31 blocks) collects references around the sculptures. Each item below links to its block.

• Martin Puryear (block, his Matthew Marks Gallery page, the channel's first entry): carved wooden sculpture between the geometric and the organic.
• Daiga Grantina, ЯschlepR (2015): sheets of translucent film and fibre hung from the ceiling with a strand trailing to the floor; and a sculpture by Anna Uddenberg.
• Buckminster Fuller: an illustration from "R. Buckminster Fuller: pirated transcription of interview videotaped by Raindance Corporation" (Radical Software, p. 5), stippled spheres resting on a stack of wavy layers, one sphere floating above.
• Hōraku, Owl Attacking a Bat (LACMA, early–mid 19th century) (block): a carved netsuke.
• A snail's anti-clockwise shell (block): a Telegraph photograph of 2016 from the story of Jeremy, a garden snail whose shell coils the rare way.

The channel's one text block is the Deleuze and Guattari line from A Thousand Plateaus (1980): "Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire." Damon Zucconi first posted it; van den Dorpel connected it in December 2017.

Also in the channel: Tom Holert's e-flux essay Spaces of the Learning Self; a print from 53 Stations of the Tokaido as Potted Landscapes (1848); a phone screenshot of Douglas Tausik Ryder's carved wooden Objects; and his own work: a link to note 1314 (an image-only sculpture photograph), Assemblage (New), a hanging assemblage between columns, the dissociations list of assemblage entries, and drawings added in January 2023 (tear, concretecube, heap, blob, system). Two other channels are connected: his own Algues Artificielles and Gavin Atkinson's Globs.

The 2018 Assemblages

Assemblage (new) hangs from a chain in front of a panelled wall. Its strips are printed with a halftone dot screen that thins out across each band; loose yellow lines are drawn over them, and black rivets join the crossings.

Assemblage (About) hangs on two wires in a white niche between fluted pilasters. Its clear strips are printed with columns of text and small pictures that look like press pages, and it is that sphere: Assemblage (About reviews and press) of 2012 (851), remade in 2018 for Pattern and Presence (the artist, November 2026; → Pattern and Presence). It was the work he showed in I Was Raised on the Internet at the MCA Chicago later that year, in the section Touch Me, where the wall label gave the first version's title and year (→ I Was Raised on the Internet).

After the Assemblages

Chrysalis Sculptures (2015)

The Chrysalis Sculptures are three: Chrysalis (blue), (mint) and (green) are "hanging sculptures made from UV printed heatshrink foil and other packaging materials" (harm.work). Chrysalis (blue) is a long, crumpled pupa shape hung from a single thread, its shrunk foil printed in red, blue and white with a fragment of a logo near the top. In the group photograph the three hang side by side at different heights, each a closed pupa shape of shrunk foil, tight in places and creased in others: (blue) on the left, (mint) in mottled greys and greens in the middle, (green) on the right with a band of white dots above orange and red stripes, like the markings of a real pupa. As in the Assemblages the image is printed on a flat sheet before the sheet becomes a volume; here heat shrinks the foil tight, where the spheres were held together by rivets. The captions of the 2015 installation photographs call (blue) "MK II" and (green) "MK III"; earlier versions are not documented. The three were shown in Just-in-Time at American Medium, New York, in 2015 (→ Just-in-Time).

Photographed alone, Chrysalis (mint) shows how the foil was closed: a seam runs down its left side, the foil is shrunk tight over a lumpy body, and a twist of clear foil hangs from its lower end.

Bags (2019–2026)

The harm.work medium page: "Later work turns to brown paper shopping bags, first hand-cut, then CNC-cut, and nested inside one another." Spectre is a single brown shopping bag standing on a grey cabinet, a ghost shape with two eye holes cut out of its front. Bag and Another Bag were shown in Notes on Objects (Narrative Projects, London, 2019; → Notes on Objects), a sculpture show answering Robert Morris, whose checklist titles them Invariable Depth Constellation and Pseudocount Arp Bootleg; Another Bag is "Based on the work 'Constellations' by Jean Arp from 1938" (Works Overview). The method is the Assemblages' in another material: a printed or ready-made flat sheet, cut and joined into a volume. The five bags of the Bags series, the CNC-cut ones of 2026 and their sources in Arp's prints are on Bags.

Recursive Intervention (2023)

For Our Inner Child the artist placed a ready-made mirroring inflatable in the gallery, "Not so much a sculpture; rather a light, site-specific, observation" (harm.work). It is treated on Recursion and Self-Reference.

Sources and references

• Travis Jeppesen, Revenge of the Spheres, text for About, Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2012: full text; excerpt at harm.work/exhibition/about.
• The artist's text on the series: harm.work/series/assemblages; the medium page harm.work/medium/sculptures.
• Manuel DeLanda (639); Giorgio Agamben via Leland de la Durantaye (1266); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980); Jean Arp.
• are.na: harm-van-den-dorpel / assemblages.

See also

• Assemblage Identity — DeLanda's assemblage theory, Bruner's "slaves to the particular" and 1301 everything vs. anything
• Release Early, Release Often (2013) — the Abrons show for which 1035 was drafted
• Loomer (2015) — Assemblage (shell) in Los Angeles
• Just-in-Time (2015) — the Chrysalis sculptures
• Bags — the cut paper bags after Hans Arp (2019–2026)
• Recursion and Self-Reference — Recursive Intervention
• Process Legibility — the making left visible in the result
• Works Overview — chronological catalogue of works