Sift…Shift
University Art Gallery, Chico, CA, 2011
Sift…Shift, 30' x 30', University Art Gallery, Chico, CA, 2011
Sift...Shift is a mult-media installation, incorporating sound, video and sculpture, displayed in the University Art Gallery, Taylor Hall, at California State University, Chico. The viewer enters the space on a large deck, which leads to a false partition shingled with myriads of overlapping pillows sheathed in white slips. Gentle sounds of night-time crickets fill the space. Sift…Shift is made up of six individual sculptural elements: Last Dance, Red Rover, Gate Keeper, Night Sounds, Listening Table and Scarf Dancers.
The divided room functions as metaphor for time and how through Einstein’s predicted wormholes two separate moments in time can be simultaneous.
A video of ocean waves and shorebirds is projected across the sculpture Last Dance and onto the opposite wall enveloped in mylar. This causes a shadow of the sculpture to interact with the waves, and visitors can see their shadows in the projected water.
Last Dance
Last Dance, jewelry case, glasses, umbrella, 5'h x 3'w x 2'd, University Art Gallery, Chico, CA, 2011
A video of ocean waves washing over the sculpture, casts a shadow.
Red Rover
Red Rover, wagon, used parts, box, aluminum cast of dog, 2'3"h x 3"6"w x 2'2"d
Inside the wagon is a box and nestled inside the box is an aluminum cast of a dog with a pale-blue patina. There are two peepholes inserted into the box allowing the viewer access into this other realm. Straining, the viewer can see part of the dog through each peephole
Gate Keeper
Gate Keeper, bedhead, trike wheels, door handle, found weather vane, 5' x 6' x 2', University Art Gallery, 2011
Beds are where we are conceived, born and often die. As such they function as the gateways between this realm and the next.
Night Sounds
Night Sounds, 100 pillows, binoculars, cd player, recording of crickets, 11'h x 15'w x 1/2'd, University Art Gallery, 2011
Night time cricket sounds softly fill the gallery. Binoculars between the pilows give access to the other side of the room, where scarves slowly brush the gallery floor.
Listening Table and Scarf Dancers
Listening Table and Scarf Dancers, table top, extended legs, conch shell, scarfs, 1rpm motors, powder, University Arts Gallery, 2011
A table to listen under…
Slowly circling scarves brush the gallery floor… Scarf Dancers is a multiple of many scarves tied in series and hanging from motors that rotate at 1rpm. They slowly brush the surface, moving the powder, sweeping the floor…
One Breath
One Breath, scarf, vintage fan, 2011
Communing: Dirt, Calling Home, Running on Empty
Dirt
Dirt, bicycle wheel, 1rpm motor, copper plate, earphones, wire, 5'h x 3'w x 3'd, 2011
…the wheel turns slowly and the wire twists.
Alchemy is, “The quest for a fabled elixir capable of turning copper and other base metals to gold and also a quest to prevent human beings’ bodies from becoming old...” (Wikipedia)
Dirt and Calling Home intentionally incorporate the twin concepts of pataphysics and alchemy. Pataphysics was invented by Alfred Jarry and is “The science of imaginary solutions. . .”
Calling Home
Calling Home, goggles, can, table legs, plasticine, plexiglass, surgical tubing, 4'd x 1 1/2'w x 3'h, 2011
Alchemy is “The quest for a fabled elixir capable of turning copper and other base metals to gold and also a quest to prevent human beings’ bodies from becoming old...”
Running on Empty
Running on Empty, glass, surgical tubing, plastic, fan, water, 1 1/2 ' x 1 1/2' x 25', 2011
Eric Kandel postulates that memory is what defines us as conscious beings. Because it is all memory except the moment of now...
These pieces are part of a series I have been working on called Communing, because it is about trying to achieve a connectedness across barriers. When my father died and later my sister, I felt a continued deep presence from each of them.
Recently my mother passed and I have not felt that same connection, though I expected to. My search is not about whether or not there is an afterlife, only a desire to feel this continued presence.
Art is not apart from life, and in these pieces my desire to connect and my effort to fid a specific feeling are asserting themselves.
Traces
Liberty Arts Gallery, Yreka, CA, 2010
Traces installation views, Liberty Arts Gallery, 2010
Traces: A sign or evidence of some past thing. A perceptible sign made by something that has passed.
Magellan’s Bench
Magellan's Bench, Liberty Arts Gallery, 2010
In “In Search of Memory,” Eric Kandel recalls his memory of an SS officer in Austria banging on their door in the middle of the night, and how that affected his memories of that night as well as the course of his life. He interweaves this personal history with the exciting science of research neurology. Unlike Kandel, I have few very specific memories from childhood, and have been searching to recover some trace of the lost history of my past.
Smoke Gets In My Eyes
Smoke Gets In My Eyes, 1/2 vanity, chair legs, glasses with pink liquid, 1rpm motor, vintage record player and record “Smoke Gets in My Eyes”, 4'h x 3'w x 3'd
The impetus for my search began when I observed my mom’s loss of memory due to progressive Alzheimer’s/dementia. At ninety-eight it is not unusual to be suffering from memory loss, yet it is difficult. As she forgets, each level of forgetting leaves her with one less way to access the world around her. From conversing about politics (one of her favorite pass times pre-Alzheimer’s ) to playing bridge, “What is trump?”(for the hundredth time). Interestingly, however, I have observed that what happened in her distant past is still, sometimes there, magically clearer than the present moment. She can remember odd things that happened to her as a child, from the weird stranger in the London city park to the feel of the ocean spray in her face sitting on an out-cropping at Cornwall. These things she remembers well. My concern is that I can’t remember the past other than intangibles like a familiar smell, touch or sound. But no events.
Traces installation view, Liberty Arts Gallery, 2010
Eric Kandel postulates that memory is what defines us as conscious beings. Because it is all memory except the moment of now, we are only conscious because our neurons collect and categorize our memories. Memories define each of us as the person who was here, and experienced that. At this point in his book I started to feel slightly bereft, maybe nonexistent, and I went in search of my memories.
Looking through old photo albums with my mother was reassuring. I was there. As I set about transcribing these photos into paint, sometimes I could feel the grass between my toes, or the wind blowing my hair. Still no specifics, but I felt I was there.
As I continued this search new sculptural forms evolved and abstracted. This installation is a culmination of a year of reckoning with traces of a forgotten history, and an attempt to access a place where as Italo Calvino says in Invisible Cities, “Desires are already memories.”