This space, created site-specifically for the MassArt gallery at SoWa, holds important elements that compose the anchors of ephemerality. It is an invitation for the viewer to enter the space where objects are easy to define – mostly familiar, yet disquieting in their stillness, imbalance, and silence.
I look for connections to the familiar, but pull the rug out from under it. I glean household objects sitting in your basement: a chair, a spoon, a ladder, a bicycle wheel. Distilling memories of loss and grief, white becomes a means to find anonymity within which to mourn. I think about the engineering of balance and interdependency where the connections of small and big objects hold each other up, entwined, leaning, and supporting.
You enter the house and find corks, glasses, ping pong balls, utensils, multiplicities - expressing a number from 0 to infinity – a notion of the extent of time crucial when adjacent to the notion of space.
Time, space, multiples, cadence, and rhythm. Viewers can follow this rhythm on their own. You can find tension in the stack of chairs, then end up in the wheel, which could be a clock – and in some sort of harmonic chaos everything is turning in space and time, yet a stillness, a peace, a quiet, pervades the experience and you may find yourself trying to revisit the same event over and over again
My spaces become less about the objects but more about the juxtapositions between the elements and how or where they touch, and what they hold up or prevent a fall. Every person can see it in their own way.
A professor of mine said this piece is like finding yourself “Frozen in time - like going into Miss Havisham's room in Great Expectations.” But also movement, very subtle, in and out of focus, where things appear and disappear, so the story becomes complicated, frozen in time, yet moving in time. I have long thought in this manner of set design, or experiential immersion, and to be equated to it is a privilege.
All the objects are intentionally balanced, engineering gravity, set in precarious situations, with exception of one stationary conventional scene - a mirror and a coat rack These two elements allow one to feel ok, maybe I can be here, this I know. This is an invitation, to either enter, or leave in peace, having seen yourself, in the so very ordinary hallway. We can look at ourselves in the mirror, and exit the house, and step out onto the street for whatever the next moment brings.
Time and language - telephones, journals, old books, new books, and modern signage. A little scooter creates a reality for some, the embrace known, yearned for, and the fear of being enveloped and consumed.
Things are not moving but at the same time they are. in communication. There is a quietness, handwritten on the surface that condenses and disappears. There are tipping moments, and a logic needed to grasp. It is not only my logic, it is yours too.
the details are all familiar, stretched on a hammock between language and rhythm. My heart is racing. What is this chaos about, is it my chaos? is it your chaos? is it a stillness between us? Do we contain within ourselves both opaque and reflective surfaces? Is there a border between chaos and order? Does it reflect instability and preparedness, with such care and calculation otherwise it would fall apart?
It is here, in the current of today’s struggles, of my struggles, where I have discovered the core of my work to lie. Where I try to compose a visual way to depict my own internal space, emotions, and questions, in light of the ordinary.