2011
Plywood, Timber, MDF, Glass
145x90x38 cm
Even a Velvet Rope Can Leave Its Rope Burns explores the relationship between artistic signification and the viewer’s capacity for individual reflection. The title alludes to the notion that the seemingly sterile appearances of modernist art and architecture can be an expression of something genuine and troubling. The minimalist construction, absent of color, is at once demanding and freeing. Taking the architectural form of a corner window, its traditional function as a transparent barrier is transmuted into a broader framework for the understanding of artistic encounters, which viewers must themselves complete with personal meaning. The window becomes an object which itself can be employed as a surface onto which the observer’s reflections are projected. This new unadorned structure is stripped of such concepts as ‘interior’ or ‘exterior,’ requiring a reinvention of even the most basic points of reference. As much as the piece has the shape of a corner window, it also has the form of an open book and points to the ways in which interpreting any work of art involves confronting a barrier and moving beyond it. Indeed, the barrier is the condition for reaching new ways of seeing and thinking.
Text by Amanda DeMarco