SPACE THAT DREAMS ITSELF, 2014

site-specific installation (two rooms, two stairways, existing pipes, paint, framed drawings and collages)

Solo(s) Project House, Newark NJ

In Space that Dreams Itself, a site-specific drawing installation for Solos Project House, the stairwell serves as a formal and poetic starting point for my investigation. A variation of the stairway, the zigzag pattern poses a repetitive directional movement. Solo(s) Project House offered the unique opportunity to develop a dialogue between two rooms with almost opposite characteristics. The lobby itself – challenging and complex with more doorways than walls is unlike most lobbies. It is not a place for lingering or waiting, but functions primarily as a space to be moved through. While familiarizing myself with the “other side” of each doorway in the lobby, I discovered an adjacent room. This dark mysterious “closet” was inaccessible, serving solely as a treasure chest of salvaged dumpster finds, debris of a decaying interior, and a thick layer of dirt and dust. The process of uncovering and emptying the space eventually exposed a unique architectural find: a set of stairways leading nowhere.

In his book The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard explains-

“Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space…Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. It mows and ploughs. We should have to speak of the benefits of all these imaginary actions…”

Bachelard discusses the psychology of interior spaces and how they often lend themselves to hiding, secrecy, mystery and to other personal, poetic or imagined realities. As I am repeatedly compelled to investigate “inner” spaces, I discover that the lack of content of a vacant space, can be defined either by the limits of its surrounding structure or by movement through this contained emptiness. I find there is a poetic significance to over-looked, underused and overused spaces within the built environment and this can be tapped into through drawing attention and attention to drawing. And that through a visual refrain, or rhythmic repetition there comes a kind of physical charge lending itself to an alertness of being in that space.