A woman enters an intimate space that hosts a small installation: a suspended 1940's-era vintage garment, two cone-shaped sculptures (one made of cement and the other crystal) and one white coffee cup tucked beneath a grey folding chair. A painted niche folded into one corner recalls flattened forms and celestial domes of Byzantine iconography. A second iteration of the performance fashions a triangular roof and archetypal house shape to later ground the piece. The dress reflects the same navy shade as the field it’s set against. A subtle rotating motion, induced by the building’s heating system, results in an ongoing perspectival distortion of white spots. The performer gently steadies the dress, pulls it from its hanger, and manages to slip into it. She climbs upon the folding chair (a white pedestal in the former iteration, on which rests a found grey stone and hand-painted wooden egg. In the shadow of the egg, a trademark Macintosh/Apple sticker was pressed).
Turning into the painted corner, she begins to run her hands along the wall, picking at small round stickers that have been painted into the wall’s silhouette. For the next hour she continues to remove these hidden round stickers revealing more and more of the constellations that reflect the pattern of her dress. She places most of the stickers into her dress pocket and must contort into various shapes to reach each piece from her perch. Upon removing the last stickers, her form has dissipated into the space behind, leaving only her arms, feet, and face clearly distinguishable. She turns back toward the audience and performs several simple rituals, rotating feet and fingers around the egg and stones or blindly knitting a long strand on her fingers from yarn tucked into the coffee cup.
This performance addresses the power of objects that linger beyond personal experience and how these experiences echo within a vast communal expanse. Interaction with a living altar comprised of charged objects found, figured and gifted mimic performative religious ritual. Their arrangement links moments within a larger narrative about romantic love and identity that has dissolved, but the content of this piece is not reliant on private history. A woman simultaneously hypersexualized by traditional contexts loses her “hourglass” form to the surrounding field in a durational piece that speaks to the transformation or rejection of the sexualized self. Her movements refigure the composition of constellations. As they twist and buckle, the viewer may sense both the weight of one body’s presence in the universe as well as a potentially utopian collective vanishing point.
