Saturday, July 26, 2008

Escape! November 2007


Escape! was a multi-media installation that was shown in The Project Room (part of the gallery space at The Burren College of Art). My show in The Project Room was due to be exhibited 5 days after I presented Come In and Visit. Due to this time limitation I chose to adapt and re-purpose many of the elements I used in the previous show.

One of the key things I learned doing Come In and Visit was how much I enjoy and appreciate collaboration with others as a part of my art practice. For Escape! I again asked Jon Rentler to collaborate with me. I was very impressed by his writing and also his generosity and enthusiasm. I wanted his work to not be overly influenced by words I used in explanation of the installation. Instead I built him a miniature of the finished installation and told him only that it was titled Escape! To my delight he returned with a series of amazingly creative investigative reports that provided speculative explanation of what took place.

This perfectly suited my idea for the space. I incorporated the cage, the barbed wire photos, redid the tree cut-outs, and the drawings of creatures with angst-filled eyes. I created a net out of the red and blue string that had made the web/ thought matrix in Come In and Visit, and projected Twirly Whirly a video of myself twirling around in the wind on top of the burren.

The concept behind the installation was escape from the cage and eluding all of the traps and barriers of my own making (literally and figuratively) - to freedom.


I was very very happy with how Escape! turned out. I felt that with it I was able to focus the creative chaos of Come In and Visit. Both exhibits helped me to realize that while I really love making individual pieces of art, I am most interested in using different elements to create environments that reflect the concept that I am trying communicate.























































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