Wrecking Ball

This is what it looks like after day one. Day one which was also the “opening” (though it was really the opening for the Contemporary Visual Culture class’s show a few doors down; most of the traffic we saw, so far as I could tell, came from random passers-by and drunk assholes pounding on the windows, the latter of whom I could have done without. As could, I expect, the world. I did have one funny encounter—an older lady came through, looked at Broken City’s bulletin boards, Leesa’s balloon/stage work-in-progress, and my thing, and eventually came over to me and asked what “the story, here” was. Oh, the irony. I’m not really the person to go to for the docent script, like, ever, and blurted out something about a number of collaborative and individual projects that would be developed in the space over the coming weeks. She said something like, “Oh, I assumed this was all you.” I said, no, just the Florida bit was mine, and she looked relieved. “Oh, I liked that. I understood that.” I did not know and still do not know what to do with this information), which was weird but not unpleasantly so.

I don’t think this is the final form for the installation. To clarify a bit: the framed beach scene (top left), Florida-oranges box (bottom left), the sign (top right, which you can’t really see, but which shows a market scene with the legend “Island Spice”) and the mirror were all in the space when we got there, as was the newspaper from July of last year (it’s in the Florida-oranges box; I’ll shoot details later), which has a headline to the effect of “Take a Vacation in Your Own Back Yard!” a story about making do with Windsor since nobody has money to travel. There’s also a book in the box, which I found among my mom’s things after to move to Ohio, called Eden to Sahara: Florida’s Tragedy.

The “vacation” wall decorations need to be reflected in the mirror, that much became clear as soon as I put the mirror on the floor, but they’re not tall enough to rest at floor level (this is why the one is higher up). The thing to do will be to raise the mirror by about two feet. There’s all manner of weird crap in the back room of the space (old soda crates, a car’s bench seat, a collapsible stage, a bike frame, etc.). I think I’m going to see if I can find enough junk to make  a level platform for the mirror. I think this will better get across my point, not that I’m sure what that point is, entirely (hence my curiosity/alarm at the one woman’s declared understanding, which may or may have not been the result of a not-unreasonable assumption that anything involving parrots can mean only one of a limited number of things).

I’m coming around to the fact of how important more impromptu gestures like this one are to what I do, generally. Certainly it was crucial (and instructive) to have had the gallery to myself, last month, to be able to micro-manage every aspect of the installation and fill a space entirely with things I made, but there’s a different kind of satisfaction to be had from making something of a more marginal space as one encounters it, incorporating (or in fact, building a project around) random bits and pieces as one finds them. I need to finally break down and read One Place after Another (the book; I first read the essay that became the basis for the book about five years ago, and it was years before I could really go back to making work), because the very notion of “site-specificity” gives me some serious heebie-jeebies. I need to be able to explain why it’s so loathsome when other people do things like this but not when I do (I am approximately 37% joking, here).

Anyway, natter natter natter. More photos to come, along with photos of the other projects going in. Here are a few more wide shots to hopefully give some sense of the kind of room we’re working with.