If I Were You: An Apology From Myself To Myself
Half/Dozen
2012
In many ways this installation felt a bit like an annex show for Intimate Historical Fictions recently up at Place, December 2011. Here I am assessing the idea of choice as it relates to the fictionalizing of our stories. I guess I am really wondering at what point the appearance of self-direction within a story happens, and really whether that is possible. I feel it is the negotiations between constants and transitions that give the appearance of choice, everything is possible in that space and we can fantasize about what might be, but that’s only because all the variables are never available.
I've set up a space where the walls take on a blue to a gradual pink or I guess pink to a gradual blue. Pink here represents transitions or spaces that are sensory and can be activated. In nature often pink is seen in spring blooms, autumn leaves, sunsets, sunrises, flush cheeks, our lips and mouth, even burns and mosquito bites. Blue is often seen as a constant the sky, the ocean, most bodies of water and is seldom represented in nature. It's the meeting of the constant to the transitory that I'm most interested. Here in our personal lives the negotiation between the constant and the transitory that we image choice to live.
The white plants used in the installation in the abstract planter are a sword fern and heavenly bamboo. Both of these plants were in the yard of the house I grew up on Johnson St. We were incredibly poor on housing (section 8), food stamps, government cheese, etc. I thought of them as the plants of the disadvantaged. After I moved out I ended up really getting into gardening and it has been my primary hobby/interest for the last 16 years. After a couple of years I really began to appreciate the use of sword ferns and heavenly bamboo. I would go to nurseries and found them to be plants that were not those of the disenfranchised. It was the negotiation between the constant and the transitory that made me enjoy those plants again. I retold the story, but it was dependent on my history, nurseries, and seeing them in other people's yards. I don't think I really chose to enjoy them again, but the variables the way they interacted with each other made it so it couldn't have happened any other way.
Personal narratives are in a consistent state between the constant and transitory and this installation is a system that examines that relationship.
Exhibited at Half/Dozen Gallery
February 2012