Marker

Marker is body of work focused on the unintentional aesthetics of progress and the marks left behind from the systems we use to build and arrange space. Over time systems stack on top of systems and blur into one another. To organize something is to make it disappear, and order has a lingering sadness to it.

The series began with a collection of inadvertently painted stones gathered from various construction sites and subsequently organized by color. Used as a way of indicating boundaries and providing instructions to workers, color-coded paints are applied throughout the worksite and often spill over onto the surrounding rocks and landscape. In the wake of progress these stones remain as emblems of the organizational systems that displaced them. This expanded to photographing a wide range of marks used in the construction process and broader evidence of alterations. I also began noticeably editing and digitally modifying select images in order to add another plainly visible layer of reorganization.

Here is a small statement on Marker written by Jesus Vasallo, curator of the Chicago Architecture Biennial:

Daniel Everett’s digital images, grouped under the name Marker, focus on urban space through reading the traces left by change in the literal surfaces of the city. His systematic recording of the ground plane as the site of the programming and reprogramming of collective behavior and public life is a testament to the way that architecture and urbanism become a pervasive and almost subconscious presence in our daily routines. For Everett, modernism and its legacy exist simultaneously—although not without conflict—as a utopia and as the actual normative space of mass-produced architectures that form the backdrop of life in the developed world. Through the ambiguity and nuance of his visual technique, he walks us seamlessly through a series of scales, focusing on the tension between order and imperfection that defines the substrate of collective space in our contemporary condition.