In his essay “Spectacles of Waste,” the urban scholar William Straw highlights the method of “rhythmanalysis,” a field of study that the sociologist Henri Lefebvre outlined to focus attention upon the vitality of cultural forms and their passage through time.
The urban environment is a space for stasis and perpetual motion, oscillating constantly between immovability and change. Infrastructure is the most visible example of an urban characteristic that evolves extremely slowly, whereas the traffic that flows within infrastructures represents a comparatively faster rhythmic and circulatory phenomenon. Cities forge specific relationships to temporality in which objects persist or pass away.
“The rapid turnover of things and ideas and the concomitant erasure of historical sensibility have long been diagnosed as defining features of urban life,” Straw writes. Put simply, cities tend to accelerate cultural rhythms.
Measuring the vitality of metropolitan life is concurrently one of contemporary art’s tasks. The nowness of artworks determines their currency amidst ever changing communities that assign monetary value and cultural heft to them. Yet, in their material immutability, enduring long after the ideas that they convey or the traditions within which they belong fall out of fashion, artworks often irritate the impetus to define the immediacy of the urban moment.
The work of the young artist Dexter Barker-Glenn exemplifies this tension between slowness and speed, urban rhythms and artistic revolutions.
“I feel really light and alive when I’m working with material that has a history,” says Barker-Glenn, offering me a tour of his latest exhibition, First Water, installed in the second room at Centre Clark.
“I’m interested in the weathering of objects. It’s the most interesting part of them, and I’m just drawing attention to that, in a way. I hope that it makes people excited about the world around them and that it’s inspiring to see. I think that the real art is the objects. Like these banners,” he says, gesturing toward a sun-faded commercial sign depicting a blue diamond that he has appropriated, perforated, and stretched like a cinema screen in the middle of the room.
“There’s a condensing that’s happening in this piece. I am doing something to these objects when I make them an art piece and put them into a gallery.”
In this exhibition, too, is a striking mosaic composed exclusively of dead flies glued to the wall in a sunburst pattern. The flies form a gradient of colour, fading from black to white as they approach the center of the configuration. A replica of a dead deer stitched from remnants of the diamond banner sits lifeless on the floor beneath the fly arrangement, an oblique reference to Iphigenia, who in Greek mythology was sacrificed to atone for her father Agamemnon’s ill-conceived hunting expedition.
What Barker-Glenn is doing is at once naïve and brilliant: transforming trash into treasure; elevating waste within this reverential space; taking readymade objects and redesignating them as works of art; and using the commodity that the central image signifies — a diamond — to comment upon capital, extravagance, and the deep-temporal vitality of material life cycles.
“This image of a diamond is trying to be permanent,” Barker-Glenn muses. “The image of the diamond is pretending to be a diamond. It’s serving a certain job as an image. But its materiality fails at that goal.”
I first met Barker-Glenn in 2024 at Ateliers Belleville where he occupied a small studio space and was working at that time on a series of 3D-sculpted friezes constructed from layers upon layers of spent lottery scratchcards. The hyper-specificity of this project intrigued me, as did its singular aesthetic qualities. “There’s this desire that capitalism has to keep on growing and accumulate energy,” believes Barker-Glenn.
It was imperative to him that he source each used lottery scratchcard through a process of bartering, with local depanneurs eventually offering boxes of them to him for free when he told them what they would be used for. “It was quite easy to get them to give them to me,” he recalls. “Often they were forgotten.”
He also acquired the diamond banner by agreeing to hand-paint a new sign for the shop’s proprietor. “I had them for a while in my studio and was quite intimidated by them,” he tells me. “But I was confident that they were important images.”
The more I consider them, the more meaning these objects accrue. The random value of any individual scratchcard, or banner, whether it is successful or a failure, stands in for an entire ecosystem of paper money in which one bill is absurdly worth more or less than another.
Ultimately, belief is what undergirds this system, an agreement to act as if stacks of paper have intrinsic significance. Yet, we have progressively been moving through an era where disbelief and disagreement characterize post-capitalist aspiration, in which chance dictates fortunes as much as traditional measures of value — like labour, or quantity, or quality, or demand.
Barker-Glenn relocated to Montreal from Toronto in 2017 at the age of 17 to study studio arts with a minor in computer science at Concordia University. “I kind of had thought that computer science would be a good career choice,” he says, “to learn about coding. But I’ve never done a coding job. A lot of it now is pretty redundant. A.I. stuff has taken over.”
Barker-Glenn’s work, shuttling restlessly among the disciplines of painting, sculpture, and process art, appears least like anything that Artificial Intelligence could reproduce. “My next project is actually kind of about A.I.,” he reveals. “It’s about data centres and the environmental impact that is hidden away from us. A.I. seems free to use. I’m interested in these places where these seemingly non-material systems are material and have waste.”
Barker-Glenn’s diamond banner similarly fluctuates between useful and useless, functional and junk. Indeed, art-writ-large is identified now more than ever as non-functional production, labour divorced from use value, matter void of purpose.
“Art often serves an economy,” explains Barker-Glenn. “But something is art when it’s not functional anymore. It’s like a tumor of wealth or something. Some form of art always serves a purpose in an economic system. But I don’t think of my art as functional. When it’s art, it becomes an object that’s thought of as holding currency, and when it’s waste, it’s thought of as damage to the environment. It becomes a waste product. It’s interesting to think about materials in this way.”
The political theorist Jane Bennett recasts agency as a network comprised of human and non-human material in her 2010 book, Vibrant Matter. “It seems that the appropriate unit of analysis for democratic theory is neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective,” Bennett argues, “but the (ontologically heterogenous) ‘public’ coalescing around a problem.” That problem today, as it has been since the emergence of authority, is power and its arbitrary rhythms.
A philosophical undercurrent runs beneath Barker-Glenn’s work, one that ultimately unites Bennett’s and Straw’s political economy. “I’m very fascinated with how waste connects economic systems with ecological systems,” he tells me.
“There’s lots of ways that technology is used to make it seem like we’ve moved forward, politically,” Barker-Glenn observes. “But it’s all threats of violence that are obscured through these systems. There’s a threat of violence that’s maintaining it all.”◼︎
First Water by Dexter Barker-Glenn continues through 28 February 2026 at Centre Clark, 5455 Av. de Gaspé #114.
Cover image: Dexter Barker-Glenn at Centre Clark photographed for NicheMTL.
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