2025
2022-2024
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024
ABOUT
CONTACT
CV
The thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY,
THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE
In THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY, objects are not distinct entities but are intertwined with our perception of them. We become both the perceiver and the perceived when we imagine interacting with an object that suggests a function or action, an implicit stage direction. The "thickness of flesh" both of the body and of the tangible world, their unity in the reality of physicality brings us to a realization of our own physical limitations epitomized by mortality. This perspective challenges the traditional dichotomy of subject and object, proposing instead that our body’s ability to both touch and see, as well as to project the experience of touching and seeing, unifies these experiences, and highlights the vulnerable interconnectedness of our being, our awareness, and the sensual world to which our being and awareness belong.
Ecstatic time can only find itself in the vision of things that puerile chance causes brusquely to appear: cadavers, nudity, explosions, spilled blood, abysses, sunbursts, and thunder.
GEORGES BATAILLE,
VISIONS OF EXCESS
VISIONS OF EXCESS
Assertive and transgressive, bold, solid, architectonic forms convey a restrained virility and severity designed to incite. Coy and playful, and thematically dark, even morbid, they insinuate a psychic disjoining which capitalizes on the abstract time of the theater in which real time and play time are overtly simultaneous. This duality invokes the transcendent madness and disembodied ecstasy of an encounter with the divine.
The show’s title, THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY, alludes to several sources including the eponymous 1926 silent film and 1895 popular song, both derived from an original Fitz James O’ Brien poem written in 1859. Stills of the 1926 film are included in the show for reference.
In this universe, texture conveys accumulation. Cash, dirt, grime. Surface imperfections, revelations of craft, become a means of entering a work which is tauntingly invitational and yet austerely impenetrable. THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY, a kind of puppet theater in which props are elevated to the role of actor, charged, charges us, as we become entangled by looking. We discover ourselves dislocated by a relation to that which brings us out of ourselves, an exterior force, omnipresent, but in our day-to-day lives, invisible – is made visible by object work.