“The railroad, the photograph, the telegraph, were technologies for being elsewhere in time and space, for pushing away the here and now. They made the vast expanses not so vast, the passage of time not quite so unrelenting.” Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows
For this installation, I’ve reimagined the basement level as fluid and permeable—both in terms of space and time. By employing video projections to simulate exterior phenomena (reflections and refractions from adjacent tunnels or subterranean spaces), I aim to enliven the gallery’s architecture. The existing pipes fixed to the walls are employed as apertures—as holes that perforate the space, allowing potential light from the exterior to inhabit the interior. Emerging from these multiple diaphragms, projected spheres of light flicker and cascade through the darkened subterranean space, rendering movement which conjures both the building’s history and reveals its proximity to underground trains.
Light is utilized to bring awareness to the architecture itself while simultaneously envisioning phenomenal potentialities, by which I mean interactions of light and space that are possible but may never exist. The space itself is void of ambient light, focusing the observer’s attention to the projections which disappear and reappear. Darkness is critical to this installation—not only because of its underground location but because of its link to the photographic apparatus. The flickering ellipses not only simulate the rapid movement of a passing train (one that frenetically eclipses light) but they mimic the speed of film, of the moving image. Here, the observer witnesses a potential past or duration—one that comes to inhabit the now.
This site-specific draft was composed for the basement level
of Sculpture Center in Queens, NY. It was not accepted.