Six Of Inside Straight Goin Thru Simply Existing Surface

“Inside Straight Let’s See Goin’ Thru Simply Existing Surface” is a five-room gallery installation that immerses viewers in a progressive series of spaces designed to recalibrate and expand their sensory perception. This project emerged out of my longstanding interest in sensory evaluation methods including full-field stimulus vision tests and hearing tests. The first room is a prelude that activates the viewers’ sight and hearing: in a custom-built small theater, twelve visitors at a time watch a short film (8:30 min.) combining a gradual examination of the details of a painting by McArthur Binion with my soundtrack (featuring myself on woodwinds and David Virelles on keyboards).

The film is projected simultaneously on three screens: in 2-D on a 10×18 foot screen in front of the seated audience, and in 3-D on two screens angled away from the viewers on the right and left. The second room (“Inside Straight Let’s See”) shifts to a visual encounter with language, through a carefully distributed arrangement of fourteen 6×4 foot printed canvases. I am using cast-metal letterpress type to print words and phrases by hand on fabric. The language is drawn from Salman Rushdie’s 2015 novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, although the aim is not to summarize or depict the plot of the book; instead I have extracted isolated words through a visual confrontation with the sheer materiality of Rushdie’s language.

I have designed an intricate printing technique: each letter is comprised of a group of smaller letters (for example, the shape of an “E” might be constructed out of an arrangement of eleven small e’s and v’s). The viewer is initially disoriented by the masses of individual letters. Only as she approaches the canvas do words and phrases become perceptible. The third room (“Goin’ Thru”) features a sonic installation in which three overlapping voices recite and improvise with the words and phrases from the second room, in patterns that will echo and reinforce the language the viewer has deciphered on the canvases in the preceding space. The fourth room (“Simply Existing Surface”) is an installation of fifteen 4×4 foot, high-definition giclée photographic prints, moving away from the materiality of language to prompt the viewer to consider a rich interplay of visual surfaces. On the wall are mounted eight photos of manholes and drains on the street in Italy, revealing the complexity of pattern, texture, and material in even the simplest everyday infrastructures. And from the ceiling are hung seven contrasting photos of the exterior walls of anonymous Italian buildings.

The final room is intended to serve as a postlude, combining the different formats used throughout the installation for maximum contrapuntal effect: the viewer is confronted with a 30-foot long, approximately 4-foot-high bespoke “vessel,” a massive structure resembling a boat that appears to be suspended in the center of the space. The sides of the vessel take the form of a decagon, with four panels covered by the photographs alternating with six panels covered by the letterpress word prints.