SV Randall / as pair legged

SHIFT

DREAM OF ELSE OF EYES

WHERE VACANCY

DRIFTS IN

HOLLOW

If this house is a hologram, then what were we? A limb caught between here and there. Always twisting. A shadow cast somber without light. A moment frozen beneath a coat of shellac. A cloud of hurled words wavering. The single hum of a glowing white refrigerator.

Demarcated dirt denotes distance. And divide. A nonplace where there is only elsewhere and other and afar. And the grooves of my shoes are already caked in mud. Endlessly scrolling our attention slides - never sticking to any-one-thing. Eyes that float and shadows that sink. There is only threshold after threshold.

A downcast gaze is symptom of wanderering. Distracted by veneer. Veer. Deflect. And avert. Self willed alienation. An escape is always just beyond. Lonely, lost, and peculiar this is an atmosphere of splintered identities. When not swallowed up we are left to stumble. Atomized and dissected there is only the possible, plausible, and potential. Interwoven indecisions like bees encircling the hive we call head. Always spilling and coagulating at once. Entombed in a machine we call body.

Collecting Shells

Acrylic on carved Polystyrene, MDF, plaster, and epoxy

44 x 44 x 60 in.

Trace Inscribed

Birch plywood, acrylic paint on rubber, grout, canvas, raw clay, hair, and plants
62 x 82 x 4 in.

Side Door

Acrylic on carved Polystyrene, MDF, wood, vinyl and epoxy
36 x 50 x 80 in.

Movings Around

Birch plywood, acrylic paint on grout, gravel, raw clay, hair, and mesh, plaster, carpet, and cast resin
62 x 82 x 4 in.

Like fins on the surface

Birch plywood, acrylic paint on foam, grout, canvas, raw clay, hair, and steel
62 x 82 x 4 in.

Hollow Vent

Acrylic on carved Polystyrene, MDF, steel, and epoxy
33 x 48 x 80 in.

Whole octaves

Acrylic on carved Polystyrene, MDF, and epoxy
48 x 32 x 74 in.

An oversized suitcase, a door in miniature, an air vent in a rock. Varying walls of tiles, cracked dirt, gravel, tarps, and architectural floor plans. An adhesive paper veneer of marble, a metal railing, and a drain leading nowhere.

Although the exhibition, as pair legged is strewn with common objects, these accumulations are not still lifes referring to the narrative of the everyday. These collections of domestic, architectural, and travel detritus are dissected from familiar context. They are remade, rearranged and staged in fragments as a metaphor for dissonance, disorientation, and placeless-ness. These are the leftover shards of a nomadic mind. Stripped from their utilitarian function these replications of the overlooked trappings of daily life are skewed in scale and are disorienting in perspective. “Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.”1 as pair legged is a porous environment in a state of perpetual reconfiguration where the human element is a transient residue.

These objects denote a shift from here to there - yet we never quite arrive anywhere new. A threshold, as simple as a single doorway, can destroy an entire cove of memories. The moment a threshold is traversed, a signal is sent to the mind that a new scene has begun, that its time to refresh. To restart. To forget.

What happens when the thresholds we traverse are virtual or imagined?

This is the crisis of self in time. Malleable, impermanent, and entropic materials manipulated by invisible gestures explore the delicate architecture of interiority. Fusing extraction with belonging this collection of new works is an exercise in escapism and its overwhelming outcomes. The sculptures throughout the exhibition compress both intimately particular memories with permeating generalizations. Ripe with rifts between diffused actualities and artificial fictions, as pair legged probes at the overwhelming simultaneity of our interior and exterior worlds.

1. Virginia Wolfe, Street Haunting