James A. Enos is an Assistant Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Core. His research engages issues of process, architecture, and social artist practice in an effort to understand how public culture responds to change. He received a BS from Purdue University, a M. Arch from The NewSchool of Architecture, and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Enos is a recipient of the 2013 San Diego Art Prize, and has served as artist, director, and founder for several public projects including The Periscope Project, Drone Readymade, Exploring Engagement, Port Journeys, HyperCultural Passengers, WeTrees and Social Logistics.

For the past 15 years, Enos’s work has explored the impact of transnational, industrial production and, in particular, rapid urbanization of the San Diego-Tijuana border region, as well as within additional, comparable technopoles in the Western United States and British Columbia. From the production of objects, his work has evolved to include organizing alternative land-uses, para-academic institutions, and public art projects. Often collaborative, his practice has privileged Lefebvre’s notion of “right to city,” in conjunction with assorted issues related to public space and mechanisms of civic dialog. His belief, then and now, is that the city is an urgent backdrop against which stories are framed, often for the purpose of challenging accepted notions of community, place, and authority.

Since relocating to the Southeastern United States, Enos has immersed himself in the multi-faceted phenomenon of ports, at once periphery-core geographies, sites of extraction, and mechanisms for energy transition. His recent work, which takes the form of performance, drawing, and sculpture, is concerned with the tension between representation and narratives of the global-to-the-planetary in terms of logistics and infrastructure. In particular, he has been researching how meaning and symbolic value is organized vis-à-vis the geology of fall line, containment of the Savannah River Site, and material futures of the tin-spodumene belt of the Carolinas. He is concerned to show how these acreages impose a multitude of theoretical and lived crises upon vastly differing sets of bodies. Likewise, he is interested in the formation of a new poetics, capable of capturing this uniquely spatial and social phenomena (an aesthetics of flows) as it intersects with politics, the violence of fossil fuels, biomass, lithium, and nuclear power.

Select exhibitions and presentations include the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture; Living as Form (the nomadic version), Creative Time Summit; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Asia Design Center, Gwangju; FRISE Künstlerhaus, Hamburg; Zou-No-Hana Terrace, Yokohama; Spiral Art Center, Tokyo; Forum Box, Helsinki; Modern Art Museum, Shanghai; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Coverage of his projects includes WIRED DESIGN, Design Boom, Hyperallergic, Architext, Architizer, Architect Magazine, KCET’s ARTBOUND, Planning Perspectives, The Union Tribune, HOW/NOW, City Beat and others.