FLING

2007

Steel Utility Stool, Video installed at site.

The primary elements of Fling consist of a steel utility stool embedded into a wall as if it has been thrown into a gelatinous material that has frozen instantly upon impact. I am interested in the idea of ìbreaking throughî the confined space of the gallery. Accompanying the work is a video that presents a fictitious production process suggesting that the stool has been flung from a natural setting through a sort of space-time warp to itís final resting place in the wall of the gallery a few feet up and to the right of the video. These shifts in location and time sequence create a sense of uneasiness in the viewer. This uneasiness is the displacement of nature by gallery white, it is the same uneasiness that we feel when we encounter an empty parcel of land among the compacted spaces of the urban landscape. Fling is the result of displacement and in its quiet violence it attempts to destroy the architecture of the city, the walls of buildings. Facades become artificial limits functioning as blinders. Blinders limit the perception of periphery, shrinking the vision and perception of options. In some sense pedestrians become beasts of burden. Is a building a device to eliminate the perception of options? Can a person who has never left the verticality of a city even comprehend a space that is horizontally oriented? The mundane piece of studio furniture re-contextualized by itís displacement, in actual space through itís location in the wall of the gallery, and mental space through the refusal to accept the difference between inside and out depicted in the video, presents the viewer with a disconcerting sense of his complacency in the face of a rapidly receding horizon both mentally and physically.