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Timo Fahler — TSO Border Hybrid
Timo Fahler — TSO Border Hybrid
Timo Fahler — TSO Border Hybrid
Timo Fahler — TSO Border Hybrid
Timo Fahler

TSO Border Hybrid

2017

TSO Border Hybrid materializes a pointed conversation between industrial standardization and ancestral building traditions. Fabricated from adobe sourced from the earth of Marfa, Texas, and the neighboring Mexican city of Ojinaga, the work takes the form of a conventional cinderblock, a shape synonymous with mass production and border infrastructure, yet constructed from one of humanity's oldest building materials. The interior is filled with painterly dyed hydrocal plaster and hay, creating a cross-section that reveals the work's layered logic: an unassuming exterior geometry cracked open to expose something organic, pigmented, and alive. The collaboration between Timo Fahler and rafa esparza positions this object within a lineage of critical material inquiry. Where Donald Judd famously paired concrete mortar with adobe bricks in the Chihuahuan Desert landscape, Fahler and esparza invert the hierarchy, casting earth itself into a form typically reserved for industrial concrete. The gesture carries both conceptual and geographical weight, drawing from the soil of two communities divided by a national border and recombining them into a single, unified object. The work does not illustrate the border so much as quietly dissolve a portion of it through material fact. Issued in an edition of ten and signed by the artists, TSO Border Hybrid offers collectors a rare intersection of sculpture, political geography, and craft tradition in a format both intimate in scale and expansive in implication. Its modest dimensions belie the density of its references, making it a work that rewards sustained attention and close looking.

Medium
Adobe, hydrocal, hay, dye
Overall
Signed
Yes
Location
Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX

For Sale — $2000

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About this work

Timo Fahler, TSO Border Hybrid, 2017

TSO Border Hybrid materializes a pointed conversation between industrial standardization and ancestral building traditions. Fabricated from adobe sourced from the earth of Marfa, Texas, and the neighboring Mexican city of Ojinaga, the work takes the form of a conventional cinderblock, a shape synonymous with mass production and border infrastructure, yet constructed from one of humanity's oldest building materials. The interior is filled with painterly dyed hydrocal plaster and hay, creating a cross-section that reveals the work's layered logic: an unassuming exterior geometry cracked open to expose something organic, pigmented, and alive. The collaboration between Timo Fahler and rafa esparza positions this object within a lineage of critical material inquiry. Where Donald Judd famously paired concrete mortar with adobe bricks in the Chihuahuan Desert landscape, Fahler and esparza invert the hierarchy, casting earth itself into a form typically reserved for industrial concrete. The gesture carries both conceptual and geographical weight, drawing from the soil of two communities divided by a national border and recombining them into a single, unified object. The work does not illustrate the border so much as quietly dissolve a portion of it through material fact. Issued in an edition of ten and signed by the artists, TSO Border Hybrid offers collectors a rare intersection of sculpture, political geography, and craft tradition in a format both intimate in scale and expansive in implication. Its modest dimensions belie the density of its references, making it a work that rewards sustained attention and close looking.

Medium
Adobe, hydrocal, hay, dye
Dimensions
overall: 20.3 x 38.1 x 16.5 cm
Year
2017
Edition
of 10
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX