Remote Viewing

April 29th - July 2nd, 2017
North Willows, Montclair, New Jersey

An interactive installation of metaphysical circumstance and supernatural self-determination devised through sound, vibration, and oscillation.

La Sonnette
An interactive doorbell to the ether made of common nails, 2017

This piece is a large chime, with a single pull, and about 1000 common house nails. In the development of the work, I thought a lot about the nails and found them a robust symbol for potential and desire in leaving them unhammered. The piece feels like a huge doorbell, but the term, "doorbell" is so large and clunky. The sound of La Sonnette is a delicate tinkling, it is a little song, light and gentle, and serves well as title for a doorbell of entreaty to the ethereal planes. The nails are presented outside their manufactured function. Superstitiously and magically, nails are used to bind, to hold, and like most symbolically empowered objects, to bring favor. To prepare the nails for hanging, I "worked" the twine into knots, pulling and entwining, bewitching the threads, to ordain and immanentize their power. Here, they call, they ring, they vibrate with unfocused energy. They are an accumulation of possibility, little pieces amassed to a formidable force of transference.

The Office of Requests and Petitions
An interactive altar of a block of hand-sanded wood, predrilled holes, and anointed nails, 2017

The viewer is not guided in this piece. They can look. They can sit. They can focus of on one nail and place it in a hole. They can focus on nail after nail until they are all in. They can move the nails around. They can make a shape of their desire. The invitation to kneel before the wood becomes one of genuflection. That interaction and expectation alone bestows the wood with a holiness, a right to reverence.

Phantasmascopes
Six interactive analog gifs, 2017

In making of these phantasmascopes (or phenakistoscopes), I animated alchemist Robert Fludd's 17thcentury diagrams of the creation of the universe by applying 19thc parlor game technology. A phantasmascope employs the technique of "Persistence of Vision," which is what all film and cartoons are based on to create the illusion of movement. They are nearly hypnodiscs as used in antiquated hypnosis or prayer wheels, yet seem to serve as a lens into the beyond.

Forest
Arbor telephony, 5 hanging trees with contact microphones, 2017

Together these trees make a forest. Sound and movement are the impetus for communication, brought from a quiet immobile stasis to a chaotic and random reverberation. A ring, a clang, a pluck, a hum, a growl (spoken word), a whistle, it reaches out. It calls and it calls forth. Audience members can touch, rub, push, tap, and rap the tree, no directions provided.

School Portraits
Kirlian auras of indigo children - 8 carved photographs, 2017

I enjoyed giving the figures in the photographs superpowers and these became for me the photographed auras of indigo children. "Indigo children" is a concept of evolved people with extra sensory -something or other. Included are Andrew, Asha (self-portrait), Barbara, Kenneth, Lillian, Rebecca, and Timothy.
In my carvings, my work is with a knife. I cut into the skin of the page. My process is an act of removal. I expose the white and pulpy flesh of the paper, yet it is not an action of obfuscation. The textured white forms which I superimpose and peel away are manipulations of the preprinted illusory spaces. Using only the blade, I flay the image to uncover the meat of, dull against the glossy top layer. The removed shapes fill negative spaces, add absence, reveal new depths; the patterns flow over, through, beneath, inside, between, and behind. When the composition is realized, most of the surface has been pulled away, the alterations transition it completely.

Automated Oracle Vending Machine
A spiritual consultant with a direct line to the gods, 2016

True to toy vending machines, each capsule contains a prize awarded at random. Here, the participating viewer receives a sticker and accompanying message which range from benevolences to forebodings in exchange for four quarters. The stickers are hand-cut from a book of reproductions of myth-themed paintings; the selections may be recognizable by the art-adept. The fortunes are inspired by the imagery of the stickers, one of fifty fortunes found among the series of 130 capsules.

Bubbles from the Pitch Lake / Detail of a Stranger's Funeral Pyre

A video of LaBrea pitch lake in Trinidad, 2011
A video of a Hindu cremation at Waterloo in Caroni, Trinidad, 2011

A loop switching between the pair of videos, both an exhalation of expiration, the gases from beneath the pitch has been long delayed and the smoke from the fire is fresh and full of immediacy. These videos are so similar. They are remains, they are what's left of once living things.

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