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Parking Meters
Salvaged Parking Meters, Plaster
2025
Part of an ongoing collection, titled "Tools of Use." While it is inevitable that people who use drugs (PWUD) exist in public spaces, the public health imaginary would like to sequester and contain the evidence. Tools of use, such as syringes, have seen a large amount of regulation and rationing by the federal government, making them hard to access reliably and challenging to use without fear of persecution. For those syringes in regulated circulation, disposal methods and entrance of new syringes into the stream see a high level of oversight and bureaucratic hoops. One-for-one distributions, for example, require that people exchange a used syringe in order to receive a new one back. The notations required of harm reduction organizations are arduous. Public health storytelling surrounding tools of use is heavily reliant on fear-mongering around disease and contamination, warning people to avoid used syringes at all costs, and to call their local fire or police departments for assistance in removing and disposing of “paraphernalia".
"Tools of Use" asks viewers to consider tools of use and their disposal as a permanent fixture in the public sphere. This question emerges out of necessity for materials of use and those living in relation to substances to be regarded not as problems to be solved, sequestered, or erased, but as vital parts of public space and communities. Utilizing found materials, salvaged infrastructures, and casting techniques, "Tools of Use" questions how collective responsibility to care for junkie technology might be made legible by infrastructural permanence.