Installations 1992-2000
Van Eyck's Mirror 2001
Van Eyck’s Mirror was commissioned by MIT Media Lab and The Kitchen for the exhibition ID/entity concerning the impact of technology on portraiture. The installation is based on Van Eyck’s painting The Wedding of Arnolfini. We replicated the mirror and other elements from this painting to suggest a Gothic interior.
As the viewer steps into the installation the mirror turns into a video surface revealing the image of an actor looking like Van Eyck from a self-portrait. Contrary to conventions of normal portraiture, as the viewer continues to approach the painting, the actor in the video turns away. The reflection of the painter turning his back on the viewer’s approach points to the divorce we, in the present, experience with the distant past. Memory is elusive; the present’s need to hold onto its origins is always fleeting.
The Last Minute 2000
Last Minute keeps measure of a psychically charged territory, how we subconsciously embed time through our bodies, limbs, gestures unknowingly personifying a clock’s relentless actions. The clock rings during random moments shaking the image awake.
“Electronics, like the video alarm clock devised by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, inset with a tape depicting close-ups of body movements, evoke mind-body reciprocity. Body pain, body pleasure, the body as laboratory, even — mirabile dictu — the body as a home for the soul enter into the artists’ concerns.” Grace Glueck, NYTimes, December 5, 2003
Happy Hour 2000
The clock faces portray a man and a woman, laughing uncontrollably on the verge of tears. Why are they laughing? Are they laughing at each other? Are they laughing at us? Why does sorrow sound like laughter and laughter sound like lunacy? These vintage neon bar clocks suggest an earlier time with bright, candy-colored, anodized aluminum frames. Neon lights surround them. The clocks mark a continuum –– of extreme. From ecstasy to trauma, hysteria is the image of our time.
The Turned Measure 1998
The Turned Measure is a video clock ticking just minutes before midnight, hanging above a generic white mantle. The shot pushes in slowly gradually resting on a close-up framing the face as a portrait. Faces and hands pass elegiacally through the frame floating over an imaginary landscape of air, fire, earth and water.
Steel Nipples 1996
Steel Nipples is a three-channel video installation concerned with the politics of compassion spurred by President Clinton’s 1992 campaign pledge to end “welfare as we know it.”
An adult size, chrome-plated pacifier sits on a glass plate, etched with the name and date of the law that changed the social security net, which continues to be targeted by Congress.
As plate and pacifier slowly rotates on a turntable monitors display Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton and Trent Lott tinted Red, Green and Blue over scenes from Depression era films a celluloid vision/revision of the values of care and inclusion under attack.
The Corona Palimpsest 1995
“After staring at the chained book and the tape loop of people’s gazes staring back at me for quite awhile I realized I had fallen into a kind of reverie…
I turned around to find a desk and chair which was placed on top of a floor composed of dozens of copies of an identical black and red hardbound book arranged in a checkerboard pattern.
On the desk was another large constructed book shaped like a large sketchbook, which had hundreds of pages of images in many colors transferred from newspapers and magazines using an acetone and Xerox technique. On the right side of the book another square was cut out and a video monitor was likewise placed inside of it. I watched this tape for a long time transfixed by the series of poems primed in white against black interposed with montages of moving and changing and falling words and letters.”
– Nick Piombion, Chain
Mon Cheri Sentimentaux 1992
“A giant box of chocolates decorated with Victorian angels captures the habit-forming allure and the sugary stillness of soap operas. Video monitors in the center of the chocolates include images from “Days of Our Lives” that rotate in a circle, keeping perfect time to the theme from “The Young and the Restless.” Like any good box of chocolates, this one has a guide inside the lid to identify the candies. There is Coconut Divorceе and Not His Baby Butter Cream.”
Caryn James, The New York Times
The Bible Belt 1992
Cut into the middle of Proverbs, a salesman is hawking the Bible Belt affirming traditional values on a video monitor. It seems genuine with its requisite zeal, but it soon becomes clear that actors are involved and the video alternates as though by automatically channel surfing with other material taken directly from television, where excerpts of real televangelists are followed by glimpses of scrambled porn: the juxtaposition produces a disturbing logic, as to suggest that the marketing of desire is really a clever shell game. As a book, the Bible is rendered almost irrelevant by the sculpture.
– Jason Weiss, Felix Volume 2, Number 1, 1995
Breakfast of Champions 1991
If reading a daily newspaper is “like taking a warm bath” as Marshall McLuhan claimed this installation focuses on the flow of information during the Gulf War, how it spilled and washed over the daily surfaces of our lives, saturating our nation’s rationality with empty calories.
The installation comprises a breakfast table with red-checked table cloth, American flag place setting, cup of coffee, half-eaten toast and chair. On the corner of the table is the nation’s newspaper of record The New York Times, its front page a composite of headlines clipped during the Gulf War. A gigantic yellow ribbon casts a sinister blessing over the entire scene.
Replacing the front page photo is a video monitor. Beginning with Bush’s “kinder, gentler” 1988 presidential ad, we see the real George Herbert Walker Bush holding up his baby grandchild. “The candidate with no constituents,” glides through the screen amid surrendering prisoners of war, explosions, tanks and paratroopers.
