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“Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
There are a few modalities that operate in my process of late: one involves the material of light, one considers the residue of the absent body; the other builds the unknown, imagined space that brings forward an object.
Smoke Clouds require blindness in the studio. Silver nitrate and tin, even glass, are all clear materials when I manipulate and combine them. Even light, as it etches its rays into the glass in the process of "exposure", captures the air’s alchemy and the surrounding conditions in mysterious ways. I am pouring material that I can’t see. Only in the last moment, does the image appear.
All I know originates from my body: my body moves in a way to direct the material in order to find an ephemeral explosion or the residue of a past destruction. Sometimes the ghosts that the material captures are unable to render tension, and I must wipe away the gesture and begin again. My process requires my bodily participation to bring forward my presence and then ultimately it requires my removal, as the mirroring, environment, and the viewer’s body all create the space, not me. My removal of image and artist’s body are fundamental to Minimalism’s questions of representation.
Chandelier came from the desire to put forward the unrepresented body by inverting an otherwise "delightful," decorative centerpiece into an ignored American history. I borrowed the chandelier’s structure of suspension to hang a limp rope, curved to express a certain body language. I also took the chandelier's materials of light and glass, particularly lead crystal, so that its transparency and natural illumination could potentially become political. --"This is not a rope"-- but rather puts forward and pays homage to all the invisible bodies seen but not heard. It speaks to the residue of violence invisibly infused onto a landscape. Andre Breton's understanding of beauty as it must be "convulsive or will not be at all" is delicately explored in this work.
Chandelier with mirrored Smoke Cloud diptychs. Cloud image appears and disappears as a "puff of smoke" depending on the environment and viewpoint within the space. The self-abnegating nature of mirrors is that viewer and environment become the image as the mirror itself vanishes.
The video Invisible Object takes the light of the camera to document subjects describing: an object as it appears to them in a dream or unfamiliar space; an object they cannot name or understand. The subjects are placed in front of a two-way mirror and recall with eyes closed, through verbal language and physical body gesturing, the shape of things. The subjects’ body language mirrors each other and collapses in onto themselves to build one large imagined object through time. The title of the piece is taken from Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void-- a figure holding that pregnant space of nothing and everything. My video tries to continue this idea to allow the subjects to imagine the space “in between”, in order that they may build an object that vanishes, once they open their eyes and look in the mirror.
With eyes shut, subjects recall shapes of objects from dream or unfamiliar spaces or object they cannot name or understand. The multiple subjects’ body languages mirror one another and collapse onto themselves to build one collective, imagined object through space and time.