Mancunian Drift. 2016.

Neon, sheetrock, plaster, oak

Artist Statement

The walls of the gallery space are left unchanged, the same white paint covers the spackled and dried paint dripped walls. The floors are a clean grey, a shade lighter than the main gallery floor. Gazing upwards, blue and purple neon pushes through a crack in a ceiling that floats in the middle of the room. The light soaks into the gallery walls, spills onto the plains of wood grain and is then cradled by black pools. The lines that fill the gap in the ceiling present variations in energy, each realizing a difference of expression. These gestures are derived from different moments of distinct emotions, though, being wedged into a singular cut, they attempt to fuse together in search of a complete direction or trail of thought.

My desire was to create a space that would induce a trance, allowing the light to traipse through the gap in the ceiling and into a dream. The small reflecting pools are containers of a black potential, having you dive into a no man’s land and take you on an unexpected tangent. The solid and angular nature of the ceiling and the benches contrasts the softness of the light as the two seek a balance. This balance is repeated in the ceiling which has been split into two parts, the pools that allude to a possibility of once being a whole, and the incomplete quality of each bench that is consumed by another.

The benches are the heights of the chairs in my studio. Comfortable chairs, they encouraged me to create a tiered system of benches where each one is fragmented and taken over by an adjacent bench. If you are 3 feet or 7 feet tall, the benches are accessible to you and bear ample room to breath and to experience the installation. These benches were not designed to be crowded by large families, or couples holding hands, but rather to provide plenty of elbow room to drift off without the touch or heat of a neighboring body.

Fabrication Process

The oak used in the benches of the installation were milled using a portable-mizer over one year prior to assembly. The slabs were allowed to dry slowly in a covered space while spaced and racheted together. There were two nails mid milling which taught me to never mill a tree that is anywhere in or near a property line.

To bend the neon tubes I made a cross-fire burner using black pipe and was able to work in the courtyard of the studio arts building. The tubes were then pumped at Lite Brite Neon in Brooklyn, NY where I was continuing to work part-time. Both the blue and the purple tubes are argon, however the blue also has mercury in the tube which creates this difference in color.