The Wild Ones Are So Tame Now is intended as an installation that conflates a vague archive with an institutional, scientific display of cultural artifacts; a constellation of images and memorabilia that represent subjective memory as much as they ape an historical museum. These works continue my examination of the built environment as it relates to social readings of freedom and risk.

Many of these works are derived from documentation of the Summerhill School, founded in Dresden, Germany in 1921 by A. S. Neil. The Summerhill School is an independent boarding school that gives its students sovereignty over their term and the legislative structure that forms their environment. Initially opened in reaction to corporal punishment, the school appeared prominently in the popular press of the late 1960s. In contemporaneous articles a debate as to how this image should function in popular consciousness ensued— was this image one of freedom or one of chaos? Though still active in Suffolk, England, the focus of this exhibition is the period of turmoil and optimism of the 1960s.

In one drawing entitled It is Not the Belief That is in Question but its Efficacy, a nearly illegible abstract object laboriously built by a young child has been carefully re-rendered. But this labored object, although recognizable, is unnamable. These gaps in clear reading, moments of recognition deferred, maintain the formulation of understanding Summerhill— a speculative netting of fragments posited by the viewer/student.

The Rules are a collection of dictates from the Summerhill School copied by a Scandinavian visitor and published in 1971. These are re-ordered and designed into a poster made to look like a broadside from the Art Nouveau movement. In fact the rules of the school are perpetually in flux and under negotiation. Here, they vary from the sensible “No child may swim alone” to the peculiarly specific “No sticks with nails in them.”

A video piece, Faktura, documents an actual contemporary playground built by children in Berlin, fluctuating between a documentary map and a more experimental montage analyzing the aesthetics of child-built structures. The film also functions as a metaphor for histories perpetually influx as the playground is torn down annually to be built again. – Corin Sworn