My interest in staging space for encounters led me to conceive of and construct the installation Warm Walls. Using the ideas of camouflage, concealment, peepholes, and portals as a starting point, I sealed up the established entrance to my studio and cut a large diamond shape out of an existing wall. The new opening provided a slightly treacherous, but space defining entry point. What was inside was now clearly part of the environment (including visitors), and that which was outside was clearly other. The extracted portion of the wall became a central sculptural element that hid a part of the installation while simultaneously pointing viewers to a path through the space. Cryptic photographs of objects of concealment and elements of disguise were placed under Plexiglas on top of pedestals. Others were pinned to the side of the pedestals, or only made visible through a small hole in the wall. Singularly, these images might confuse, but in relation to each other they provided a narrative of absurd attempts of disappearance, where visibility and invisibility somehow converge. A hollow mesh wall made up of a double layer of stretched window screen optically danced as a viewer moved through the space. Though the wall itself was a static element, the patterns created by the layers of mesh consistently fluctuated as your eyes traveled around the room, giving the wall an eerie, haunted presence. Beyond the wall was positioned a found material sculpture rising out of a plant on the floor. Part mask, and part artificial tree, the anthropomorphous object slouched in the corner, unable to stand on its own, and faced visitors with a grin of questionable intentions. The corridor created by the backside of the screen wall acted as a transitional stage of the lighting in the installation, shading it and setting up darker conditions in the space that lie just beyond—a ladder leading to a black square. Those brave enough to climb found not a painted illusion of space on the ceiling, but rather a hole cut just large enough for the head and eyes to enter a mysterious attic. Allowing for the eyes to adjust to this new environment, viewers were rewarded with glimpses of a strange, foreign space dotted with objects like an otherworldly landscape. This turnaround stage of the experience, meant to slow down the pace of the viewer and literally change the way they look at things, prepared them for a return trip through the installation to look at the same space in a new way.
173 W 81st Street
5E
New York
10024
New York, NY
New York
New York
North America
