My work emphasizes a phenomenological approach where modified architectural environments solicit a heightened level of somatic participation on the spectator's part. The spaces I construct become large membrane-like participatory environments--made from materials such as translucent stretchy fabric, industrial rubber, plastic, and guy wire-which require activation by the participant to give it full meaning. These environments re-engage us with the world in a visceral way therefore challenging institutions which privilege physical distancing and social divisions. Form and content are synthesized as participants journey through the sculptural passages, creating and transforming its composition, while it has the resilience to bounce back to its original, autonomous state. This interaction between object and subject raises the connection between viewer and artwork to an intimate level.
Through seemingly simply inversions of a gallery's architectural and institutional relationships, alterations in perceptual and behavioral properties of participants can begin to arise. The modification of a conventionally rigid and clearly delineated gallery into permeable passageways and structures encourages alternative ways of exploring an environment. The forms of these structures appear to expand and continue beyond their physical and institutional limits, acting assertively on the space around them. The intrusion of these forms into the surrounding space forces the participant to consider the environment (including other participants) in which they are situated. I hope that these environments do not obey the restrictive and sanitizing prohibitions of the architectural and institutional system in which they inhabit and instead provoke behaviors that are characteristically not included in the aesthetic experience.
The environments I develop consider that in a given place self and society interact in life as in art and the relationships of their participants will vary: they may contend, approach, join, or dissociate with each other. I place an emphasis on the intersubjective blending, clashing, intertwining, and overlapping through which we participate collectively in the apprehension and construction of a shared sociocultural and physical environment. The conditions of such a social environment are observed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. "What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together to relate and to also separate them." An art of place actually assists in the identification of individuals and groups and what separates them, so that an agreement on a common purpose is an impassioned deliberation rather than a thoughtless resignation. Rather than separating and distancing the participants (including the artists) of an aesthetic experience, an art of place (an environment) can assist in developing relations built around human centers who are oriented by and within spatial, temporal, and sociocultural categories.
This is something that can be accomplished through dialogue.