UNSEEN FORCES
2008
installation
Airports, offices, malls, high schools: metal detectors are everywhere. There’s something both wonderful and awful about these dumb, clunky devices: they’re situated in such highly fraught but also totally mundane environments, in situations where masses of people must be processed and moved on quickly, efficiently and undramatically. We are now complicit, for the most part: we allow ourselves to be processed, and pass through.
Unseen Forces is an installation of sculptural objects, shallow-relief panel cut-outs, and wall paintings. In the installation, walk-thru metal detectors function as portals/thresholds into more otherworldly environments. The “landscapes” on each of the four gallery walls have four specific points of reference (high school, Eden, touristic islands, shopping mall). Two full-scale, sculptural metal detectors within the space must be passed through in order to tie these environments together.