5 historical monuments

dimensions: 70'' , 60'', 105''

medium: latex gloves, fiber glass, plastic, light fixture, gallery space

year: 2007











5 Historical Monuments

This piece was about the trail of action that is left behind; footprints, brush strokes, craft, construction. It is about how these traces of action build into a form which both gives and is a part of a greater context of everything happening at once. I wanted to literally freeze the traces of a repetitious action, symbolic to the patterns which govern the equivalence of time and space.
I dipped my hand in fiber glass, and put it on the mound, then would release the glove as a trace that my hand had been there. Initially I had thought to record this process on camera, but then realized that any capture of an action does not recreate the initial process, and so i found it arbitrary. A measurement of action. Time does not exist in that sense--things move--it is just one continuous action. This action is a constant interchange of space changing position; by the same line that brought the materials I used for the piece into my possession, it was the same action which brought the idea into my head, and left it all in a heap from which society may draw a greater context. After all of this; the idea that the only thing that I can capture is a tangible manifestation of this constant action, and never the action itself, parallels that of the craft and idea that leads an artist into the creative process.
I pay homage to the materials I use by titling each of them as a historical monument, and then lastly, identifying that the 5th and only true material of the process is the context which governed them into their situation; being the reason I listed "gallery space" as a material. The gallery serves as a miniature model for this piece, and the process of positioning the gloves transcends the space that the piece will ever occupy. As soon as the last glove was placed onto the piece, the piece ceased to exist.
I decided to light the piece as a statement about the allure of the senses. As an angler fish reels in its prey with a light, we similarly are bound to gravitate to our own sensorial definition of space. Often, in nature, and in myth, it is the gravitation towards light that prevents one from experiencing the true beauty of the presence and consciousness that what we are (ie. the inverse of our body, the space which we do not fill in the universe) transcends our ability to understand.
As I look at the materials, within themselves, as works of this process, others look to the product of my actions with these materials, as though somehow they were not a part of it. I did not make this piece. It just happened.