Statement

Out of Touch is inspired by a newly ubiquitous object—the automatic hand sanitizer dispenser—and by an icon that appears on many dispensers showing two hands cupped in supplication, a gesture that encapsulates our ambiguous relationship with devices that perform thankless service work.

With worn surfaces and warped forms that could be mistaken for stone or metal, 26 individually hand-built ceramic dispensers are mounted on pneumatic universal VESA arms that branch from walls and freestanding trees. Although elevated like precious artifacts, the dispensers appear to have been dispensed with. Foreseeing them as part of long geologic time, the installation imagines how dispensers might come to exist in the far future, millennia from now, when they are run dry. Absent human hands to touchlessly trigger them, being "out of touch" would relieve them from automated servitude.