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Twentysix Piles Jeffrey Langille


“Piles are not pretentious—they are just there being beautiful and doing their thing. Why piles? The structure is usually determined either by the object alone or the object plus the piler's imagination or lack of it. Naive piles usually are the greatest. It's the molecular structure and physical characteristics that give pile materials their nuances of stackability.” Iain Baxter&

“The aim here is to rattle the adamantine chain that has bound materiality to inert substance and that has placed the organic across a chasm from the inorganic. The aim is to articulate the elusive idea of a materiality that is itself heterogeneous, itself a differential of intensities, itself a life. In this strange, vital materialism, there is no point of pure stillness, no indivisible atom that is not itself aquiver with virtual force.” Jane Bennett

The photographs in Twentysix Piles reflect a curiosity about the persistence of human digging into the earth, and also about this world as constituted by processes rather than substances. Matter is never inert stuff. Self-organizing, self-shaping, and vibrant, materials exert their intensities whether we interact with them or not, and offer a glimpse of the non-human world that we are a part of.



Jeffrey Langille lives and works in Dawson City, Yukon. His work in film and video has screened in Canada and internationally. In addition to photography and moving images, he also works with sound. He holds an MFA from Simon Fraser University and teaches at the Yukon School of Visual Arts, on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation.





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