WoffleHouse

Dolphinhotel‘s structure is informed by a postcard I picked up in the Arctic Circle in Norway a few years ago: 9 slivers of a time-lapse scene of the midnight sun dipping down then arcing back up, the sun mirrored in the sea below. The foreboding black ornamentation is a stylized version of the Madonna Inn logo. The Madonna Inn is a hotel in San Luis Obispo that is something like my spiritual home: goofy and extravagant and imaginative to the extreme. There are 24 small circle illustrations rising and setting across the piece: each one mirrors or references something in another, all of which add up to a general sense of the inside and outside of some unknown place. There are multiple binaries and oppositions in the imagery.

The title refers to a hotel that appears in two novels by Haruki Murakami. This piece is not at all an illustration of these novels, however. It’s much more about trying to tap into that indefinable, weird, murky imagination that pervades his writing, and my own attachments to similarly compelling qualities I experience whenever I’m traveling, or in transition in some significant way. Hotels are consistently satisfying liminal spaces in this regard.