THE TANGIBLE + INTANGIBLE WORLD OF AMANDA PHINGBODHIPAKKIYA // Kat Mustatea, Brooklyn 2019

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, in the midst of talking with me about the works in her solo exhibition, “Connective Tissue,” at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, pauses a moment. “I feel I should address the use of inflatables in this show,” she says, suddenly.

She sits in her studio, surrounded by stacks of boxed supplies, as she goes on to describe how inflatable objects have key properties that bridge the physical and the ephemeral. For example, they make it possible to model and shape a sub- stance like air, as is the case in her piece, Campfire. Inflatable cushions are also in- strumental to the method she devised for measuring touch in Impulse, a piece that illustrates the function of a connective substance in the body known as myelin.

Phingbodhipakkiya notes she wants viewers to become involved in the pieces; as it turns out, touch is one of the key conduits for the involvement she hopes to in- stigate. In Binary Outcomes, the invitation to touch is explicit: touching the wooden boxes along the wall produces sound, and the more people touch, the more the sound builds from a single harmonic to a quintet. The show moves from material to material, from pleasingly colorful murals, to 3D printed busts, to projections, to an AR app, to lampshades and other home furnishings made from a decomposable substance found in mushrooms for the piece [De]compose.

“I’m making the invisible, visible,” she tells me, and, indeed, much of the show is a mode of illustration, either of physical or social phenomena not usually available to sense perception. For the piece There are no particles only fields, a representation of the behavior of subatomic particles rendered in steel frames and shock cords, the illustration is made by changing scale and material. For the piece In the Company of Great Scientists, a series of colorful busts of female explorers and scientists, the mode of illustration is literal, using a likeness of each figure as a starting point for describing their role in history.

I linger longest over Strange Sequences, perhaps because the consequences of touch are most loaded. For this piece, visitors are given a printout with one of several ethical dilemmas written, and a set of multiple choice options for how they could respond. As an example: if scientists develop a miracle vaccine that gives children an enormous cognitive boost but is suspected of causing Alzheimer’s Disease later in life, would you vote to vaccinate everyone right away, or wait the 50-75 years it might take to verify the adverse effects? Visitors are asked to drop the printouts in one of four waste paper baskets corresponding to the course of action they would choose, accumulating a kind of public vote on each issue. What would it say about you if you decide to value your child’s achievements when young above their quality life as they age? Or vice-versa?

I would want to stand nearby during the show, watching visitors weigh each dilemma and toss their votes; I would want to look each visitor over and try to guess something about their inner life and experience based on the way they make such a choice. Yet in Phingbodhipakkiya’s version of this vote, it is not the people that are most prominent, but the four baskets full of more paper or less. Over time, the physical accretion of voting is left, a visual tally that is abstracted from both people and the social consequences of their choices.

The piece January is a Girl, which features a set of projections about the phenom- enon of synesthesia, along with a companion performance piece, is perhaps the one work most likely to stand in for the whole. In its restless materiality, in its movement from idea to action, from memory to projection, from sight to touch to sound and back again, “Connective Tissue” reads like the journal of a synesthete. It focuses emotional, scientific, and social concepts toward a localized sensory experience: paper being crumpled, sensuous color, shapes, pulses, blinking lights, a face.