Vortex in the Play of Theater with Real Passion:

IN MEMORY OF KAY STOCKHOLDER: APRIL 2000

Staging the mind body problem:

The bench with the light pointing at the wall provides seating for the elderly woman whose memories are moving throughout. Skin, dry like dead leaves in autumn. Lilac winds blowing from other worlds.

The light on the wall operates in the space of painting, anchored to the paint, flat surfaces, and even illusion of this world. The air that blows through the corridor that is the gallery mixes with tendrils of story telling blowing off the surfaces of pictures hung throughout. Walking down the long path paved with wood grain linoleum, footsteps echo in the stillness of the empty. The frieze running around the edge of the room acts like the curtain of a stage, making the play seem cozy. The event is bracketed by something larger, like God.

There is fate. We are small.

Building with duplo is work; the work of construction is broken by each person’s play with design as time moves along. The duplo are placed by soft and eccentric hands full of whimsy and impulse, swimming around internal mind space, private and perhaps shared. They, the duplo, are seen against a backdrop of containers placed by sweating heaving irritable bodies, orchestrated, while orchestrating in space. The duplo put together as the containers are, stacked and interlocking. Both present with bright, flattening colors. Within there are actors, conductors, and protagonists.

To build a block of lego, thinking about a pattern or picture on the face of the block. Tying the picture to the structure on the inside. This interlocking in four directions serving two functions…structure building and picture making. The complexity of possibility that emerges in this task parallels the interlocking relationship between ideas, thoughts, images, and evocations given rise to by the work. Memory, decorating, home decor, picture making, surface, body, movement and skin again.

Sitting on the bench – an old woman is memory – eccentric activity, musty dust balls, in the glare of the lights, caught in the headlights like a photograph, phonograph, playing life.