2022-2024
SCULPTURE
COLLECTED OBJECTS
SEEDS AND CITATIONS
DRAWINGS / NOTES
PHOTO WORK
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024
FOLLY FOLLY FOLLY 2021
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The room is relatively dark. Lights illuminate paintings on the walls of the show space. Videos projected on the wall across from the installation flicker. The installation itself is bright, and illuminated by the light of lightbulbs dangling from above and warm toned spot-lights, some red hued. The installation is, in the barest sense, twenty four 1”x2”x10’ wooden poles strung from the ceiling by delicate, jewelry-like, black chains. These poles are painted in bright but slightly offtoned, carnivalesque colors. The colors are those of festival props used every spring to celebrate the death of winter, or of a faded circus tent. Strung between the hung poles, by little black hooks dug delicately into the painted surfaces, are yellow painted “coins,'' crudely rendered, and made of cardboard and paint. They are play-pretend, but therese is no pretending what they are made of. All of this stands against a backdrop: an enormous 36 foot long by 9 foot tall swath of tarp painted with verticals of varying widths. The colors of these vertical strips correspond to those of the poles, so that as one shifts and moves through the space, poles may seem to almost disappear against the backdrop, creating an illusion of flatness.
The space itself is that of an artificial reality. It is a vast forest of reduced, dead trees, and it is a life-size infographic. It is a reduction of something that has a feeling of being unstable and incomplete. There is a sense of this being a place where reality disintegrates. It is a melting reality, which permits entrance, but denies depth of access. The spectator may enter the forest, but it only goes so far. It’s infinite extension, the painted backdrop, is inaccessible in that it cannot be physically entered. The spectator is thus contained, or even repulsed from the full depth implied by the theatrical illusion.
The shallow depth of the work -- that the installation does not occupy the entire room -- results in a quality of space that bears some relation to a theatrical set. It is a superficial space, a shallow vista, a set. To the spectator who has yet to enter the work, and views it from afar, those already inside the work, drifting through it, are actors within its framework.
The coins, strung between the poles, the trees, are converted into decorative objects. Defunct or overinflated or counterfeit -- they are totally detached from their “original'' functionality, and transformed into garlands that would not look out of place on a christmas tree. This piece is a record for an act of hanging. It borrows from the language of the ornamented shrine. In this decorative act there is both a lively playfulness and a witching darkness. Simultaneously memorial and celebratory -- it lands somewhat awkwardly between the two. What has been commemorated, or mock-commemorated is the ghost of the work.
The life of the installation is a dead life that resides in the shifting shadows, and gentle tree-like swaying of the interconnected poles as someone walks quickly by, and accidentally bumps one. Even when there is not movement, there is a potential for it. The uncanny is present in the work’s construction.
Running throughout the work is an undercurrent of something unnerved or unsettled -- as if the forest itself, this strange forest of poles is deeply and incessantly uncomfortable, trying to wriggle out of its own skin.
Gravity is essential. The poles are quite literally hung, and bluntly, with no pretensions towards concealing this fate. The forceful intervention against the power of gravity pertains to a future fall. Their grace is tenuous. They are holding on by threads.