ONE ROAD TOWN
On View March 19-23
Artist Event March 23 at 7:00PM
Rubenstein Arts Center Agora
Multimedia Installation
Archival Pigment Prints on Transparency Paper Mounted to Lightboxes
Multichannel Video
Original Score
“Nothing is so bleak and unfriendly as the strip of gas stations – cut-rate gas stations – at the edge of your own city.”
– Phillip K. Dick Time Out of Joint
I have always admired writers who can nudge their readers toward a reflective impulse simply with descriptions of the more mundane aspects of life. My work follows this instinct as an interrogation of the familiar and its evocation of strangeness and mystery.
The “eerie” is likely the closest approximation to the feeling I’ve investigated. Mark Fisher’s definition illuminates the goal:
“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there if nothing is present when there should be something.”
– Mark Fisher The Weird and The Eerie
In attempting to probe the aesthetic experience of this sensory phenomena, I turn to mixed media. Through photo, sound, and film this work seeks to evoke the feeling of the eerie. Photos of suburban landscapes coupled with archival footage work in tandem with a warbling electronic score to explore the belief that these images are of somewhere which harbors something that should not be, or perhaps that it is missing a fundamental component of “place”. I am invested in pointing an audience in the direction of that which we can perceive in a lived space (houses, trees, roads, streetlights), and arousing an awareness of the residual traces of the powers that brought them into being.
I believe that this is a phenomenon worthy of attention. It urges curiosities about the forces (often intangible and complex webs of them) which dictate the way we live, the way we move through the world, and where and how we spend our time. As Fisher succinctly writes, “[the eerie] turns on the problem of agency”.
