Superior Suspension Filing 2014 is a series of works rendered in ink on obsolete filing cabinet inserts – those once – ubiquitous suspension files that often contained confidential reports, forgotten correspondence, or bureaucratic minutiae. Now emptied of their original contents and purpose, these files serve as both medium and metaphor: vessels from another era, repositories of absence, and analog ghosts from a time we can scarcely recall.
Each work opens inwardly, inviting the viewer not to extract information, but to confront what remains when systems of order dissolve. The files, once designed for efficiency and secrecy, now expose their barren interiors – splayed open like neglected archives or fossilized remains of a paper-driven world. They are not documents but the infrastructure of documentation, their emptiness speaking more clearly than their once-contained data.
Ink is applied to these surfaces with a deliberate hand—patterned, hatched and meditative. The markings do not replace content, but reframe the void. They suggest internal landscapes, structural decay, or the visual language of failed communication. What emerges is not a narrative but an atmosphere—an abstracted impression of quiet loss, of utility faded into obsolescence.
These works operate as elegies for a system now defunct, and yet they resist nostalgia. They neither mourn nor mock the past, but hold space for its residue. In the age of cloud storage and digital impermanence, Superior Suspension Filing reminds us of the material and tactile nature of once-standardized systems – of the way information was once handled, sorted, and stored with weight and presence.
What lingers is not the data once enclosed, but the curious physicality of these analog structures – hanging folders stripped of their burden, left only with creases, notches, rusted clips, and the fragile grace of disappearance.
morgan veness 