Variable Distances
sculpture, photography, poetry, collage, video, installation
Aquarium Gallery
934 Montegut. New Orleans, LA
3.9.2019 to 4.13.2019
from one point springs a multiplicity of possibilities.
the visitor traces crossed lines backwards and forwards to what may be their origins or their futures.
a puzzle of relations suspended above a collection of open boxes.
fish, maps, photos, matchbooks hang mid-air pointing in all directions
threaded pathways sewn together by mysterious logic
An analog experience of the virtual. A space as tenuous and precarious as daily life, never quite arriving, always with room to think up what might happen next. The physical manifestation of a mental process guided by a question: “what if my attitude became my form?”
notes comingle—clarifying and confusing each other, they crop out as much as they make visible
misleading artifacts, chronicles, the detective trails
marking time, tracking desires, lines of thought experience of moments and movements
flows and currents gestures, fragments scenes places traumas and ecstatic possibilities
like an amateur archeologist, searching through documents, folder, boxes in various states of legibility:
loose organizational categories, misidentifications, giant leaps across time or space. sometimes well labeled with dates, place, events, authors, photographers, and people pictured
An interactive installation created while working as Aquarium Gallery Artist in Residence, Spring 2019.
a bricolage in the third dimension constructed from a range of personally collected ephemera gathered over the recent decade.
a suspended moment on the verge of balance
a short story whose patterns and disparate elements require the imagination of an outside mind to resolve them
abstract pattern resolved into a face. narrative construction. stories give meaning an order to existence. mind gives order to abstraction, resolves into story
experience of being simultaneously reader and writer
posture and tempo, how we occupy the space, what we pay attention to and to whom we connect.
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i cannot determine what will happen, but i can develop an attitude in relation to these issues. “we prepare a face to meet / the faces that we meet”
“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” Richard Rorty
how do you visually represent music? how to you create an artwork that is uninstagrammable / something so boring and ugly that destabilizes and disarms any urge to use the experience of art for one’s own personal promotion. to not want to be seen in interesting places. to not wonder, "Will I be able to capitalize on that performance with a visual for my social media?" How is my presence at the event valuable to my social media presence?
“It’s like being inside a Cornell box”
-separate visitors to the gallery
atmosphere of exhilaration and introspection, intoxicating and all-absorbing, that becomes an impulse or inspiration for imaginative engagement, charged with an urging power
catalytic power of the Atmosphere awakens activity
chronicles
archives
catalogue
geographically, demographically, and historically contested site
encompassing visual epic
bringing many characters and materials in dialogue with one another across time and space—framed photographs, molded earth, unusual objects, and sounds—to construct tales of … that are provoked by an investigation into the space.
the resulting images of streams, spaces, and animals constitute a meditation on the evolution and uncertain fate of our ecosystems and its relation to human activity. At one moment, over the sounds of the piano and voice of local singer, we hear Givens quoting Wordsworth
“Time is the one thing we can all agree to call supernatural”
I don’t remember writing that
question is held always through the searching
a world just beyond the room with imaginaries of
on the verge of figuring it all out
piecing together the evidence