January 2008
Between the Clock and the Bed
Given the opportunity to create a Site Specific work, I chose to listen and respond to the space itself. In an effort to reveal other meanings, I drew attention to architectural elements, the eye would ordinarily dismiss, such as corners, windowsills, edges, columns, and heating ducts. In so doing the depth and volume of the room was elucidated.
In an effort to coax out the sculptural qualities of both the room architecture and the mundane, common everyday materials used, I made seventeen interventions in the space, akin to musical notes, phrases and pauses. The viewer is invited to travel through vignettes of color that punctuate the space. The color palette evolves from fluorescent pink, green, yellow, and orange, to deep purple and bubble gum pink, to the pastels of robins egg blue and teal, which reference and pay homage to both the structure and the Mediterranean blues of Picasso’s synthetic cubist paintings, such as “La Baignade” in the Guggenheim collection.
The installation, Between the Clock and the Bed, was named after the 1983 Jasper John’s painting, which I saw when first exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery. The title made an indelible impression on my mind, as each day I experienced that state of anxiety that comes from being brutally alarmed into awakening each morning. One desperately hangs onto the state of semi consciousness, savoring the warmth of the bed and the dream state, while obligations to the conscious world encroach and finally supersede.
It was only during the Edvard Munch exhibition at MoMA a few years back, that I realized Johns, himself, had named his painting after Munch’s late self portrait. The artist placed himself in a compressed space between the clock and his patterned bedspread, that has graphically inspired so many of John’s “cross hatched” marked drawings and paintings.
I, like many living in America during the Bush Cheney administration, an an heir to this sense of compressed anxiety. Here I offer a reserved and covert critique. The "Contain Yourself" bag, casually anchoring the exhibition, speaks to my strategy of survival. The first heating ventilation duct is dressed in a Super Man T Shirt/Underwear outfit, (the hubris of a nation), while the second duct comes on like the undies of a hussy fem butt crack. They bring to mind the rather vulgar yet common US Navy soldier's saying, "BOHICA," Bend Over Here It Comes Again.