1999 THE APPARITION

Foucault likened writing to”a labyrinth into which I can venture”: a place constructed by the author according to his own logic, and yet also a place where he could become lost, where identity was fluid and he could”have no face.”

Reality is made of many moments, none of which define existence. This installation is a dizzying mix of pseudo scientific, anesthetic, social and political commentary. The goal was to shock audiences into facing up to life in it’s ultimate, stark reality. The pre-conscious associations inherent in words. I want to show the objectifying forces latent in the culture, questioning the semiotics of looking, asserting the interconnectedness of human beings.

The ineffable essence of loss and decay, as a private, homemade refuge. A preexisting reality waiting to be discovered, but always partial and mediated by varied representations. Linguistic and visual shuffle metaphors for the cavernous depths to show that they all bear the same patterns. Ultimately the cage idiosyncrasies play with viewer’s expectations. Buoyant, the goal is to slow one’s perception of time,to collapse a works execution into pure preasence by eschewing didactic text.

The linear component has a distant identity, commenting on the nature of identity. I use perception as an event horizon. The projected images address one’s rumination on the subjective nature of language and its visual equivalents. The nature of the dictionary to marshal language. Light sometimes bleaching the image, like amnesia. The cage of space is a dichotomy of verbal and visual processes.Aspiration to myth, like the sound of a distant voice, is essential to each work revealed through intimate communion by the manipulation in which reality is always transformed in our varying attempts to apprehend it. Derivation/Systematization. Examining the potential chaos that lurks behind language systems, as well as why words fail. Patterns of language and physical makeup of the letters, curling likes Islamic script or fantastical initials in medieval manuscript, as integral to their meaning.

410. QUARTET OF SPIDER SOUNDS

Totem-like figures use layered striations to give surfaces a 3 demensional effect of figure and ground, resembling raised indications of magnetic fields, held in balance by forces of attraction. Striated fields of amorphous shapes conjure their titular subjects.

Flann O Brian multifaceted word plays in The Third Policeman reconfigure verbal boundaries. (The idea of leaving a bit of yourself in each place and taking away a bit of a new self.) Questioning the past as a way of navigating the future, seeking to transcend half-truths, quarter truths and one-sixteenth truths.

A collision between 60’s Foucaultian pluralistic guise occurs by use of the human facial features as the soul, frozen and iconic. Foucault’s assertion, “The dynamics and reproduction of power are fundamental to all modes of human interaction, linking issues of authorship, originality. “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author,” borrowing from Roland Barth’s Camera Lucida. Reality as a simulacrum, replaces our perceptions. The individual becomes a prisoner of his tools. Computer infrastructures only buoy our need in the current transformation from the industrial to information age, as we accumulate facts like aggregate crystals. Boundaries are found whenever connections are sought in the world of instant information. Dispassionate, quantifiable information, grappling with issues such as the intangible, nonlinear anti-object, digital technology. My installation evolves to strategy as electronic technology, operating like synaptic glitches that hum in memory, challenging the significance of the physical object.

A VESTIGIAL PREPARATION FOR FLIGHT PROPOSAL

Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Work

The installation negotiates a host of polarities. The installation involves the viewer in process of cognition, an intrapsychic wedding of male and female aspects of consciousness. Technological and biological perceptual mechanisms, as well as more parochial oppositions, like those between conventions of cinema and video. William Burroughs' assertion that “language is a virus.” Example: Rabelais’s “Gargantuan and Pantagruel” that is projected on the wall reads “taste this chapter, swallow this gloss.”

I seek to decontextualize, anomalous global circulation of signs, people and products in an endless displacement of the global economy. Decisions made somewhere far above us, everything’s of a larger context, substance tilted forward into consequence to elicit and amplify interpretations through language in esthetic forms of our patrimony. The grasp to something more than one can hold is something that seems unfortunately to be a very large part of our culture. The capacities with the gestalt of language to enhance distort and amplify meanings within its own system.

Light images exist as points of departure from which the spectator explores a personal identity. The movement between pictures and words make the installation feel intimate and book-like in scale and expression. Tactile surfaces fuse the image with its information, projecting into white milk or sand. The surrogate audience reads the show as illuminated manuscripts. Meant to encourage you, the viewer to identify with the lost subjects of history.

1. FACE OF THE EARTH

(LED projection from back of helium filled weather balloon)

Creating an Oz effect in a darkened room. The space is controlled by electronic sensors that start up the action in response to movements. First heard, barely discernible voices that seem to include the high, piping tones of children, almost birdlike. Three rib like sickle’s curved blades form a cantilevered awning of a 4x7’ Golden wing (from Verdi’s opera, “Go Thought, on Golden Wings ”, quilted wings beat through the efforts of a ventilator and motor that keep the wings aloft (parodied ideal beauty and the excess of luxury. Moving through the light slowly, creating a huge shadow, a symbol of beginning, every seven minutes. Moved by two men who seem to be pushing some incredible weight. Dimly lit, merging human, organic and mechanical by use of LCD projectors and the volumes of earth displaced from gravesites. Low-frequency speakers, of the night sounds are behind the audience, while centered under the projection is a speaker that is the voice, and on each side is the ambient music of anthropomorphic attributes. On either side of the figures gentle explosions suggest vaporized writing. Primal soil provides the scent, black earth in curved furrows extending to helium filled weather balloon. The face of a performer speaks by a raw speaker along side, like fruit cut open to release incongruous contents such as ball bearings or feathers.

By making theater of ambient illuminations of identity as projections, the first narrative of living currents flowing over the surface, while as if absorbed, the lives and aspirations likens the puppet to the vendor, a “nothing in the midst of many...

2. The Moon

A light cloud passes across the face of the moon, it speaks to us from the same weather balloon. A gravity fed delivery, entrapment, both refuge and confinement, exemplifies “the two spirits of the word, one emerging in front of action and the other continuing motionless” in that perpetual silence from which the action comes and in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being.

In the center of the room is an unoccupied over size school desk. Developing a blueprint for a populist, showing identity as a purely social construct in the mutability of identity and its ambiguous relationship with the self.

A contemporary chao-plexity theory to create potent metaphors for 20th-century alienation and cultural displacement of those who so loath their age that they refuse to understand its problems and take recourse to escapism as a cult.

The teenage proclivity for tawdry oppositions. At the center is a dissecting table with a mannequin.

Blood (ink) is being drawn from one arm, the other is intravenous feeding from a bottle of milk, conjuring up associations of both affliction and healing, bringing to life of an innate being.

The second speech is LCD projected onto milk. The vessel of milk, that essential food propelling mammalian life, whether human or ovine, through the generations.