nothing all day

E-waste gets its metaphorical charge from its sense of scale and mortality. The stuff has an accelerated lifespan, almost instantaneously going from plastic sheen to useless obsolescence. We pay to have it responsibly removed, convincing ourselves that it won’t end up in toxic electronics graveyards in China or as the subject of an oversize Edward Burtynsky photograph. He took pictures of dazzling metallic heaps of refuse in 2004, and since that time the piles have certainly enlarged, though their impact as an activist art subject has been subsumed by techno ambivalence: I’m Green—and I want my iPhone 5!

Anna Sew Hoy’s commissioned installation Nothing All Day (2011) takes computer trash in a more minimal, ambiguously funereal direction. In the past, her sculpture has evoked perverse ceramic talismans and macramé fetishes. Her practice could conceivably instill abandoned motherboards with something more than LEED-certified visual panache. Part of the San Jose Museum's Beta Space series, the project involved providing the artist with “locally sourced e-waste” from which she made sculptures that together suggest a low-tech IT mortuary. Ergonomically outmoded keyboards are stuck vertically in plaster blocks becoming prosaic beige headstones set on funky orange-stained worktables.

As literal excess baggage, e-waste proves a stubbornly inert material that Sew Hoy doesn’t attempt to demonstrably transform; instead she highlights a tension between the quick pace of technology and the deliberate slowness of the handmade—yet it’s a self-neutralizing, formal merger.

Cordage is a Sew Hoy staple, and here fiber is replaced by pliant plastic-coated wire. Large handmade glass urns are

(Foreground) 6 brands, 6 species (detail), 2011; PC keyborad and mouses, plaster, and wood. (Background) mockett and keyboard décor, 2011; color Xerox and black and white Xerox. Courtesy of the Artist and the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Kathi Cambiano.

filled with mortal coils, a Halloween candy cauldron of inedible DSL cable. On the floor, mice, with their cord tails inserted into a block of plaster, are a tethered rodent family that’s perhaps too obvious an illustration of their name to extend their gestures in any particular direction.

The most signature Sew Hoy work is made from denim pant legs, some acid washed, others a deeper blue, filled with some poly fluff and bound into a lumpy sphere with computer cords. The materials, however, are questionable: were these jeans worn by Silicon Valley techies or did the artist rescue them from her studio? The piece resembles a planet of puffy brain matter, though it's suspended so close to the ground as to be practically huggable. If it's about the mind, the pant legs are conceptually contrasting elements from below the belt. The show, however, doesn't quite compute in either place.

Nothing All Day is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art through February 26, 2012.