The flood is an ancient story that is told in many different cultures and religions, but it is also a story with contemporary resonance. Here I have created a living space that has been destroyed—abandoned and blighted by water damage. Using mostly found objects, I hope to create a tension between the real and the unreal, some things being constructed, others ready-made, while everything in the space has been manipulated.
An abandoned domestic environment implies an element that is outside of the space: the inhabitants. Inspired by the installations and sculptures of Ed and Nancy Keinholz as well as Jeff Wall’s staged photographs, I showcase private spaces to create a powerful relationship between the viewer and the imagined residents. Lacking the presence of a body, their identities exist through their possessions and what one can gather from the projected images.
I have accumulated the images from various sources—slides from junk stores in the Northwest and the Midwest, animal illustrations from zoological encyclopedias, old 8mm films from digital archives, and photographs from antique stores in the Midwest and the South. The geographical diversity within this collection creates a general American character while retaining the anonymity of a found photograph. Blurring the images furthers this anonymity, a treatment I first saw in Christian Boltanski’s work. The inhabitants never really existed, but given peripheral clues one can infer their circumstances and identity. It is an aggressive act, this contextualization, but in this installation it is welcome and necessary. I want the viewer to be critical in examining the lifestyle of the absent inhabitants.
The room’s contents maintain the illusion of the real but by manipulating them, I aim to create metaphors to elucidate the dwellers’ characters. Projecting found photographs and found video of family vacations onto furniture, I hope to draw a connection between passivity and luxury. The mouths speaking and eating underscore this point, and the wrecked detritus—wine glasses and dirty plates—hints at a level of excess. The video of animals recalls the inventory of the ark, but its pace unsettles the viewer because in this scene of destruction, it can also be an extensive archive of species’ extinction. The found slides and videos are likewise archives. Vacationing is the thread that connects them, but they are also both discarded archives. The images are intimate vignettes of family life that have been lost or forgotten. Presenting them as family records within the chairs, a space that the viewer could occupy, recharges them with the idea that the inhabitants’ existence could be our own.
The doubled animal figurines, the circular windows, and the compartmentalized structures that are present throughout the space recall the story of the ark. Given that the room is wrecked by flood, it is in a sense a failed ark that has left its illuminating remains within the vestiges of its structure. Partnering the inhabitants’ lives with the flooded room confronts the “ark” that we have built to reconcile the flood today.