Ishmael Randall-Weeks, 'Círculo concreto (concrete circle)', 2021. Courtesy of the Artist.
Signal and Strata presents the work of three Peruvian artist including Ishmael Randall-Weeks, whose practice investigates the entangled relationships between land, labour, and material culture shaped by histories of extraction and urban transformation. Through architecturally informed assemblages, Randall-Weeks examines how systems of progress, capitalism, and global supply chains are embedded within the physical fabric of the built environment.
Working primarily with found and recycled materials—including copper, cement, brick, rubber, and earth—Randall-Weeks constructs hybrid sculptural forms through labor-intensive processes. These works evoke both informal architecture and archaeological fragments, embodying cycles of production, erosion, and decay. By foregrounding material histories, the artist questions narratives of modernization and development, revealing the environmental and social costs that underpin them.
Rooted in Andean cosmologies and indigenous understandings of land as a living entity, Randall-Weeks’s practice treats acts of making as gestures of renewal and resistance. His works reflect on extraction not only as a physical process but as a cultural and psychological one—encompassing the removal of resources, histories, and labour. While grounded in specific Peruvian contexts, Signal and Strata speaks to broader global conditions of environmental transformation and displacement, inviting reflection on how power, memory, and belief are constructed and reimagined through matter itself.
January 23, 2026
