Betwixt and Between
Christina Shmigel
January 23, 2004 - July 11, 2004
"To see the industrial landscape as a tissue of relationships is a natural consequence of the assumption that landscape is a human creation·Space is given character, place comes into being, by the way human presence is manifest within it."
-Frank Gohlke "Measures of Emptiness"
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Across space, the industrial forms known as "dust collectors" face towards or away from each other, reach across the room, perhaps connecting physically in the fittings known as couplings or unions, or else continuing to yearn inconclusively. The logic of their attachment is elusive but their positions and shapes speak of human conditions: community, belonging, isolation and loneliness. While the imagery of industrial structures defines my work, its connotations are in the realm of human interaction.
The local news broadcast, the most common source of "news" information became my focus. Pssst. Hey Kid ·examines this relationship among the viewer, network and advertiser as it relates to a specific type of information exchange. I became particularly interested in the interplay of the news segments and the commercials that separated them.
In conceiving Betwixt In Between, my project for CPG, I was particularly intrigued by the gallery's previous life as a set of adjoining utility closets. Boiler rooms, utility closets, the various hidden portions of a building's working systems echo in miniature the logic of the industrial landscape. The game I play with the space at CPG is to confuse and tease the relationship between the vast scale of the industrial view with the intimate scale of the household view. I am interested in how both of these reflect our projection of our human scale on to the forms we construct.
At first view into the spaces, the assortment of connecting pipes, fittings, values, and tanks seems exactly what one would expect. But as the installation of manufactured and artist- crafted objects moves through the walls of the closets, it unexpectedly appears as though the doors had been thrown open upon a hidden world of connecting systems. Shadows are cast by absent forms. Perspectives shift. Unexpected relationships come into view.
Throughout these installations, cardboard and packing tape is used because they are familiar materials that connect the other aspects of this project to the general act of delivering and receiving. The design of each room is intended to cause the viewer to feel restricted or controlled in their interactions with the work, thus suggesting that our interactions with "news" sources are in many ways restricted or controlled. This idea of control is reiterated in the video part of this project.
What, at one moment, appears as the familiar inhabitant of the utility closet changes in the next moment to suggest a structure of monumental scale, the distant view of the industrial landscape across the river, perhaps. The viewer's physical interaction with the space reveals a changing set of vistas. Through the viewer's movement, through the kinesthetic experience of the forms, structures and encompassing architecture, the installation continually redraws itself, "place comes into being."
Christina Shmigel
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