Eviscerating
Adam Frelin
February 4, 2003 - April 13, 2003
I am always thankful of an experience that helps to undermine my tendency to quickly analyze or categorize. These moments happily take me by surprise. It may be a passing sound I've never heard, or an unusual image created by windshield's reflection, or water that is mysteriously leaking out from a crack in the road. When I encounter something like this it makes my mind go blank. It's as if suddenly my brain has no place to put this experience and the blankness is actually my mind trying to expand to make room for it. For a brief instant I am unhindered by any tendency that takes me away from that moment of befuddlement.
For my show Eviscerating, my aim was to create a situation that offered a similar type of experience to the viewer. I've made the Contemporary Project Gallery appear as if little to no exhibition was present so that your first reaction would be not that of entering an art exhibition, but of encountering a peculiar scene. The space is to look as if it were caught between shows and riddled with technical mishaps.
These mishaps, often the result of an accident or neglect, have an inherent violent quality to them. In Eviscerating this inherent violence relates both visually and thematically to the story printed on show card. The story--which happens to be true--goes like this:
My former girlfriend's father, Rick, was an emergency room surgeon. He would always tell me the same story from when he was a young doctor. It was about a man who had come into the ER late one night who had apparently lost his mind. Fearful of what he might do to himself, Rick had him put into a straight jacket and placed in a room alone. He left the room only for a moment. When he returned no more than five minutes later, the man had freed himself from the straight jacket and had gouged out his own eyes. They were hanging against his face by the optical nerves. Rick would end the story each time by theatrically gazing off into the distance and say, "It was as if he were trying to free himself from himself." He would then say that he's never seen anything like it since.
The elements in the exhibition have been gouged out of the architecture in a similar manner to that of the patient, possibly in an attempt to separate themselves from the whole of the museum. They exhume an awkward potency for not functioning as normal, be it by accident or neglect, or in this case (and for that of the patient), by force.
If these scenarios were thought to have a role, it would be to subvert. They complicate our better judgment of how something is supposed to be. At best, these moments of shock and befuddlement contaminate our complacencies and help to sharpen our awareness into the endless possibilities that everything is capable of becoming.
Adam Frelin
|
