INCREDIBLE DE/FEATS

In January, I inherited a box of twine and cords and wires that I’ve found really appropriate and thematically necessary for a lot of pieces that I have in the works–pieces combining themes of technology, communication, war, identity/identification/recognition, and how knowledge/understanding is claimed.

Playing around with the wire one evening in late January, I created some simple projects. One of which is this:

It is a nonfunctional tin-can telephone. On one side,  reads “incredible feats of communication,” while from the other end is a mirror-image sculpting of the text, “incredible defeats of communication.”

Currently, this piece hangs precariously from thin wire brads on my studio wall, though my intent is for it to hang by fishing line from a ceiling/tree/apparatus  in the center of an open space, thereby inviting viewers to walk around it and see it from different perspectives. This way, the opposing texts shift from being legible and easy to comprehend to appearing garbled and backwards, depending on the relation and perspective of the viewer that engages the piece.

To me, this sculpture is a comment on language as a dominating form of communication–one that is, for better or for worse, relied upon to carry the weight of  interactions between parties which may be great distances apart. In years when technology arguably connects people around the world, I wonder the extent to which it is also keeping people apart (both physically and figuratively), and I wonder the extent to which it affects how its employers understand what they come to know (about each other, about themselves, about anything at all).

The fact that technologies facilitate distance between encounters is frequently lost amid rhetoric about bringing people/ideas/etc together; and in the process, mutual understanding is taken for granted. We walk away satisfied from our dangling tin cans: we said what we knew how to say, and we listened to what we knew how to listen for.

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