Low Tide or The Dance of the Seven Veils

Low Tide
or
The Dance of the Seven Veils
at The Globe Dye Works

 

As we prepare to elect our next president, I feel we are also preparing to adopt a new future and past. As both parties fashion a map of the present---the means for navigating the chsllenges of the future. Each must also creat a plausible past to explain that maps topography. This is the grand narrative.
Catagenesis as the theme for this show aligns nicely with this conception of narrative generation.
A systems sustainability ultimately outweighs it's content.A catagenic system that appears on the surface to be moving in the direction of greater organization is in fact a circular system, one that reinvigorates itself by rewriting its own genesis. Content in this system is just luggage. 

This is not a nautical piece. I dont even know much about boats. I do however hold a deep appreciation for their mechanical anonymity, their historical associations, and their sensuality.
I also like their dynamic as a crowd or flotilla.
What better vehicle for talking about the narratives created by the industrial age as well as the narratives created now that attempt to explain our transition from industrial  to managerial or speculative.
The content of these grand narratives changes regularly to accomodate new information but their motive forces remain fairly constant; to create, analyze, consume eliminate and creat some more. The drives that select this content and the content itself form a closed circular system where the only   goal becomes the continuation of the system: History exists only to produce a future that justifies history The fleeting illusion of the present becomes the only zone of active power, the site of genesis, the point where the future and past are written.

These boats are conveying a message or some information through a network of power lines and ropes but the content of that message remains hidden or unimportant. What is important is the system of very human drives that propel this message foreward.








This is my current installation at the Globe Dye Works in Philadelphia.

Following are pictures from my studio while working on this project.