2014, mixed media, dimensions variable
To cross the threshold at the entrance of a home, our bodies must occupy two locations simultaneously: the inside and the outside. Crater of a Home, Corner of a Mind took the two dimensional plane of a threshold and extruded it into three dimensions, pulling into its space the outside of the yard, the sun, and the stars, the inside of bedrooms, living rooms, and other inner spaces of the home, and the inside/outside of the structural architecture that divides space into this dichotomy. Our dreams, our bodies, nature, and geometry were mixed within that extruded threshold. Its dense space, like the center of a black hole, was and is timeless. The atmosphere was stale and lifeless but still occupied by a strange presence. I built the installation, but we were all interlopers within its space.
Following Brechtian logic, Crater of a Home, Corner of a Mind was not real but rather a poetic representation of lived experience. Exposed two-by-fours, visible screws and nails, dangling electric cords, patched walls, and, most obviously, the exposed beams and high ceilings of the building’s architecture made the artifice immediately visible. The viewer was not a passive spectator of artistic representation but rather an active participant in the phenomenology of the space. Being and world became intermixed: thoughts hung in the stagnating spaces between built walls, bodies left traces of selfhood in the astroturf, sand, and VHS tape. In a Heideggerian meditation on worldhood, the viewer could not be removed from the installation, and the installation could not be removed from the viewer.