s c u l p t u r e / i n s t a l l a t i o n
A culture qualified by hyper-consumption and the radical generation of waste has produced an American landscape in which the miscellaneous debris of objects considered useless, unnecessary, or irrelevant by their former owners lie scattered within the fissures of our visible terrain. What transpires along the tenuous lines of collective cultural memory when the physical elements that comprise our lived experience--clothing, pieces of our dwellings, books, furniture, etc--are either readily replaced by newer cousins or become orphaned when their owners cease to exist? As an artist, I am interested in the "psychological life" of objects and the memories or narratives they may contain: the invisible fingerprints of former owners which mark them and their poetic potential to assume the significance of bodies that are now absent. For me, creative intervention may retrieve them from a limbo existence between ownership and destruction, and they may become small meditations on displacement and our own mortality--making us consider the substance not only of what we cast off during the course of our lives, but also of what we leave behind. As with poetry, the rearrangement of the available idiom of objects into a new context seeks to propose the potentiality of meaning that may be simultaneously specific and metaphorical. Just as memories are always subjective reconstructions, the pieces that comprise this show take as points of departure objects that are both unique and "real,"? but explore possible fictional, intuitive associations. In light of what Chomsky calls America's peculiarly acute faculty of forgetting, this body of work stemmed from a desire to explore the memory of objects within the context of our particular historical, social, and ideological moment. Perhaps the continued, transformed existence of that which is forgotten may quietly remind us of not only what we are now, but what we will become. (Markings and Memory statement)
markings and memory 2003-04
markings and memory 2003-04
Family Circle
This piece is a meditation on absence, with each chair assuming a fictional identity of a family member, present only in the imagined traces and fragments left behind in the fibers and cracks in the wood. The chairs are connected by a circular rug made of many pieces of old clothing woven together into an alternative context, becoming that which lies beneath our feet, quietly asserting a tenuous relationship to the former function of its fragments. In the context of our mortality, the smallest traces often serve to evoke the memory of a person's life; in the context of war, the smallest traces struggle against the impetus to forget.
family circle 2003
family circle 2003
family circle 2003
Occupation
History is replete with occupations, and common to all is an acute awareness of limits to accessibility, boundaries, the intrusion of one's home and its transformation into a kind of cell. Recent images of Iraqi women peering in fear from their locked windows provided an image common to many physical and psychological states of occupation: an uncountable, anonymous crowd of trapped and muffled voices subsumed by the official state narrative of so called "liberation and freedom." Just as sandbags are used to fill the spaces of windows to try to protect the intimacy of one's homefrom bombings, I imagined the use of women's clothing to function symbolically in a parallel way--a hardly effective means of protection, but often that which outlives the person in such circumstances.
occupation 2003
occupation 2003
occupation 2003
For Mourid Barghouti, Poet in Exile
In exile from his Palestinian homeland since 1967, Barghouti's memory and words remain the only connections to a land and country that exists more as an idea than a reality. Prior to the present intifada, he was allowed to return to Ramallah for a few days, but the pain of displacement persists.
The gate of gates/No key in our hand/ But we entered, refugees to our birth from the strange death,/And refugees to our homes that were our homes./In our joys there were scratches/ Unseen by tears until they're about to flow.
for mourid bargouti, poet in exile 2003
for mourid bargouti, poet in exile 2003
for mourid bargouti, poet in exile 2003
The Family Encyclopedia of American History, 1972
This piece is comprised of the pages of this obsolete text and discarded pieces of wood, stacked like books against the wall. Once a valid, though somewhat juvenile, source of information and knowledge, the "Family Encyclopedia" is now an outdated text rendered useless by the last thirty years' worth of revisions, discoveries, and changing points of view vis a vis the presentation of "facts." This piece comments on the cultural petrification of past historical narratives and knowledge, its subsequent inaccessibility, and its imposing accretion at the peripheries of present historical narratives, which are always contingent upon political influence.
family encyclopedia of american history, 1972 2002-03
family encyclopedia of american history, 1972 2002-03
Reconstructions
reconstructions 2002
reconstructions 2002
Five Pillars , 2001-02. Wood and book pages. 5 towers, 7' x 2' x 2' each
Five Pillars consists of discarded scaffolding planks and the pages from the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Interpretation of Dreams, and the Origin of Species, with each text appearing to keep its respective tower together. I consider these texts (among others) to be on a totemic level culturally, as they all offer particular narratives that attend to our basic ontological questions. I sought to give physical form to their significant presence, but also present them as texts that may be used literally in the name of "absolute truth" to support ideological constructions which in actuality reflect our fragile and flawed humanity.
five pillars 2001-02
five pillars 2001-02
five pillars 2001-02
An Account of Being and Time ., 2002-In Progress. Wood, book pages. 6 panels, 7' x 16" x 2" each
This piece is a kind of autobiographical reading of Heidegger's seminal text, "Being and Time," which contended that the awareness of our finitude as mortals is part of our fundamental condition as human beings and gives meaning to the singularity of our existence and experience. The piece consists of six 7'x16" panels, into which I bore a hole and filled it with a page from the text for each month I have lived (and continue to live). There is a visual relationship between writing and the mark making of counting, and from a distance, the piece looks like pages from a partially written book. At the time this slide was taken, I was just beginning the third panel at 24 years and 3 months.
an account of being and time 2002-present
an account of being and time 2002-present
26 Artifacts (New Penguin English Dictionary, 1986). 2002. Dictionary pages, wood. 26 scrolls, 8" x various lengths hung on the wall.
A dictionary was transformed into 26 scrolls, each containing the pages and words belonging to its respective letter of the English alphabet. Arranged on the wall and floor, the text becomes patterns of graphic mass, mimicking the pattern of computer code, negating its literal content across and through the same linguistic terms upon which it as a dictionary is predicated.
26 artifacts (the new penguin english dictionary, 1986) 2002
26 artifacts (the new penguin english dictionary, 1986) 2002
26 artifacts (the new penguin english dictionary, 1986) 2002
The Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol I-XX, 1965. 2002-05. Bark, encyclopedia pages.
Each volume of an outdated and discarded "canon" of knowledge was rolled and covered with bark to resemble logs standing in a group. The rolling created rings akin to the rings of trees, implicating time in the text's ultimate eradication from cultural memory as history and "knowledge" is constantly revised. The pages have become useless save for their potentiality as fuel, and the chronological or linear construction of time particular to man succumbs to the cyclical time particular to nature.
the encyclopedia britannica, vol I-XX, 1965 2002-05
the encyclopedia britannica, vol I-XX, 1965 2002-05
the encyclopedia britannica, vol I-XX, 1965 2002-05
all images contained on this site are copyrighted by Denise McMorrow, 2005 do not reproduce without consent of the artist