Vehicles for Another Landscape VAL. 1999 to the present.

VAL is a series of performance based apparatus that enable me to navigate the exhibition area in order to explore and challenge its’ physical and psychological parameters and that of the viewers’. Here I am more a navigator than performer presenting a set of visual/physical circumstances designed to elicit awareness and engagement in the viewer’s perception of their own active presence in the space they occupy. The logistics of the installations are more akin to promote doubt and instability in the main frame we use to gain orientation yet recall ideas of ingenuity and improvisation in the attempt to define our domain.

 

Hardplace Rock 2013

This VAL is a hybrid between a Dynosphere created in 1932 and the modernized Hamster wheels found on the Internet. The words “Hardplace” and “Rock” are carved into each side of the wheel in Braille. These holes are reminiscent of the “Glory holes” in erotic peep shows and offer a portal into what is inside the wheel making it rotate.

 

In fact I am inside stepping back and forth on its crossbeams making the structure go to and fro from either side of the Gallery space. And in doing so, it’s the viewers dodging the moving sculpture who are in between and a rock (the wheel) and a hard place, (the gallery walls).