Did the optics not try and tell us they were coming, and then we heard the BIG STOMPING a hundred stories tall, and they stepped into the little box of a room like a tall glass slipper. Chanting to myself three times which way to do it before actually making contact, I sandwiched the freshly tinned red and black wires into the wobbly stack of washers at the transformer power supply, 18′ in the air, and the piece burst to life. O my god it’s here, I said to myself about the piece I have been sherpa-ing for weeks and months and years. O my god it’s here, let me look at it softly, lightly, empty, I rotated my eyes slowly, keeping balanced in a Zen denial of the tingly twitching in my hands and feet that comes no matter what I know intellectually about acrophobia or the lift.
I could trick it up, draw in the dark shadows, and colorize them next to the brightest spots, which acts like an optical slingshot through the spectrum, making the brightest and lightest appear many gradations more intense by comparison all bumping and pinging through the rods and cones. Not so much through the circuits, though, the poor one glass camera eye, in place of the rods and cones, for an earlier read, an earlier view… what counts about the piece is not any story but the showing of the story fabric, that it’s all possible metaphor, it’s the thing that fits in this certain way in every dimension, every iteration, knowing that the mistake, the misread is the same shape in organic chemistry as in letter writing, there’s a slight misread that works like a gear and turns the entire milieu. It works like fate. The mistake that is the message anyway. The shift in symmetry.
Does it look like that’s what people are also thinking when they go through my installations? It doesn’t matter, what matters is that they like what they are thinking, and they get in there, into their own thoughts.
this work has been coming
The giant spiral on the 25’ optics wall made itself while I did only the smallest next right action, bewared of Sunday Hat Syndrome.