A Smeary Spot (NS 0)

2015
4-channel video installation. Videos 1-3: HD color, 6-channel sound, 53:13 minute synchronized loop. Video 4: SD b/w, silent, 4:00 minute loop.

Installation view A Smeary Spot, 2015, “A Smeary Spot,” Participant Inc., New York, NY

The opening episode of Negative Space, A Smeary Spot (NS 0) is an audiovisual panorama that challenges colonizing narratives that the void is an empty space yet to be filled. In this work, the void resists boundaries and occupation by remaining undefined, limitless and full of potential.

The video is staged in two sites—the deserts of southern Utah and a black box theater—both evoking the vast infinitude and unfixed qualities of the “void.” In the theater, a large pile of garbage sits at the center of all activities. Each scene is constructed from materials and props found in the waste pile, then staged, used and returned to the pile. As performers build and unbuilt their world they recite a script culled from multiple textual sources. With each recitation performers engage with props in subtle and humorous ways that re-contextualize the speech they deliver.

Performers navigate the desert observing (as opposed to surveying) the land, accumulating found objects and seeking basic resources like water, air, and light. In the desert scenes, the work highlights the surreal and sublime characteristics of the arid landscape to expose a fractured relationship with nature as resource extraction, as figured by a dam and an off-gassing power plant, are revealed.

Negative Space also examines how art and art history define cultural meaning and value. Each includes a critique of a canonical art work. In A Smeary Spot, “the Shape-shifter” becomes Olympia, the subject of an 1863 painting of the same name by French modernist Édouard Manet.

A Smeary Spot is projected on three horizontally aligned freestanding walls that cut at an angle across the exhibition space. Wheeled office chairs (props also used in the video) provide mobile seating as six channel audio orchestrates the audiences’ attention across the three primary video channels. The fourth channel runs separately on a box monitor and contains footnoted credits.