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2007
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper, 18 drawings, framed
various sizes
Derek Eller Gallery, New York, US
The work takes up the motif of the cage developed in playground. A wire mesh fence, realized as a mural, transforms the gallery’s almost exactly square main room into an imaginary cage. The illusionary closure in turn presupposes the negation of the real delimitation of the room, the wall, which is transformed into the spatial ground beyond the fence. The only elements to escape this imaginary closure and opening-up are the door openings, i.e., the real non-walls, where there is real space and thus an exit from the pictorial cage. The cage elements, rectangles in both portrait and landscape formats, frequently reinforced with diagonal bars, are distributed in a loose rhythm across the wall. Open streaks of light blue define the space behind the cages, the space of the wall, as sky. The exhibits have been mounted inside this cage. The framed collages of drawings in a variety of formats show birds, sitting and flying, in rows and grouped in flocks, many of them bearing human heads; these works have been placed on the gallery wall inside the cage. The drawings are in different techniques, and drawings of different degrees of transparency have been superimposed within the same field, forming a layered and sometimes collaged spatial depth. The bird-human hybrids, too, are in each instance composed of different sheets. This content of drawing and cage is explicitly situated inside the cage of the mural by means of a simple device. The pictorial field of the mural recurs within the (real) frame. The framed drawing shows as its spatial ground, enclosing the birds, the cage structure of the very section of the wall on which it is mounted as an object. The interrelation between figurative pictorial content and picture (a bird in the cage of the pictorial space) is thus projected onto that between spatial content and space (a drawing in the cage of the exhibition room). With the mural, which was painted over after the exhibition ended, the installation blends the situation of the gallery exhibition with a scenic arrangement; at the same time, it inscribes upon the objects that are, as exhibits, movable and for sale the coordinates of their localization in a totality of context that remains temporary. The fragmentary character of the individual drawing remains legible as a trace of this unstable constellation.