Quiet Stops Rattling Thin Air:

That car machine, that old and new. The sun pointing through the windows. The light bulb pointing and at the painting of light from the sun. A plastic covered chair sits with many white cloths, a curtain. The theatre curtain and stage set. A place to look from; a place to be looked at. But the plastic reserves use for another time. The plastic coating – clean from the rain frogs no more. The squashy slimy mass of mud is not here! Outside there is a trickle of water. A hose tied to the systems of the island winds its way through the art. It’s green too. Colors waft, as do stories around the outside of the real and functioning mechanics. Picture making – something we can’t live without, those pictures, images, the surface of our world, its skin meeting our skin – that point of contact, so full of feeling, charged.  Just one point between oceans of information: structure and rooted ness. One point in time, space and story telling.

Looking back at that work from this rattled world; I can see those cracks in my imagination, cracks of inquietude, becoming real chasms in the world that I know. (Cracks might result from rattling air.) Frightening chasms. But the rattling of thin air also offers the possibility of holes opening up to allow full rich air to rush in, or for explosions of extraordinary happiness.

Shiny car surfaces, old farm machines each with its own patina; patina that glossy merchandise catalogues present as most desirable, evocative of the glorious lost past. But here in Visby these old farm machines are just that. They are old farm machines. Moved into the gallery, their surfaces become pointed at and they hover between the real life they served and the nostalgia evoked by theatre and painting – by our bracketing of them.

Bright light pours in the window through the old little windows high up in the wall. The light is directional and moves over the course of the day. The spot light pointed at the pink paint on the wall is stationary and evocative of a post card sunset. In fact everything in the show sits still except for the washing machine that never stop slushing water around, and the water moving through the hose splashing out the holes of the sprinkler in the courtyard. The movement of the water in both places is so constant that it becomes akin to the stasis of everything else. And all the lamps plugged in too. They are static and fed by electrical current coming from a Visby power source somewhere outside of the gallery. This work of fantasy is painted with smooth swaths of car, hose, carpet, and sprinkles of water. It is also a knot tied together with the currents of air, water, light and electricity flowing to this space inside the shell of the old building.

And it’s a sandwich made from layers of tied up lamps, sewn white cloths, swivel chair, scaffolding filled with colored air and surface held by fast machines between the layers of walls, the club sandwich of Visby.

The doorways frame experience going both ways; the street and the knot of subjectivity inside. The drizzle from the sprinkler gets lost in the paving stones of the courtyard.

I remember moving around the space. I remember watching the water and the bright light of the wall outside. I remember moving inside and my eyes adjusting slowly to the living room light level inside. And I remember the stillness of the white clothing curtain next to the sound of the washing machine. And that still, slow movement no longer exists in that space. The work now exists only in the space of minds and on flat paper in pictures.

Small tubeworms: fluorescent colors, worming their way through the hard thin surface of that shiny car. Thin silk threads, shiny and luminescent form a weave – a fiberglass cloth sitting just under the thin wedge of air that is actually reflective. Big puffs of moist fog, and air filled with fog, cushion the knotted lamp floating in the same space as the wall. It’s hard to see the wall and the floating knot at the same time. But I feel like a ghost and its like being in a cathedral; I’m waiting for the heavens to open up. I’m waiting to discover marionette strings on my hands and legs. I wait. And I muster my breath, and I decide to turn left or right. But that shinny most attractive slick but smooth and silky surface is all over my body and I see through the eyes of those tiny worms that break holes in the hard gloss of the car hood.