Where Things Have Been, Have Always Been
(A crumbling, sheltering, holding, listing, blinking, echoing, mimicking, mumbling,
murmuring, interactive installation) at Krannert Art Museum, 2019
The washing performances from 2017 gave way to an alternative viewing experience of caring for private spaces. The installation designed for the Krannert Art Museum, was made from a collection of found curb-side furniture from Urbana and Champaign IL. It was designed to be safely interacted with (despite its precarious aesthetic) by any museum visitor able to reach out and pull on drawers and swinging cabinet doors. Those most adventurous and small could crawl around the inside the dressers and through television stands where lights would be activated by sound, vibration, and movement. Theremins, live mics, and amplifiers were imbedded in both exterior and interior furniture so anyone passing by could trigger a subtle whine or echo of their own footsteps from within the work. Drawers and cabinets contained marbles, my mother’s hair, dust piles, pasta, stale lollipops, and first aid supplies.
A map for the taking was presented at the large open side of the installation. The map you will see below is a drawing lithographically printed onto folded news print. “A Map” as it was written on the outside, was a fictional space representing the material of my parent’s home. The backside of the map has detailed labels of locations of sounds, smells, and textures. However many of the labels overlap making many of them illegible. Handwriting was printed via screen printing.
