Statement of Intent, April 2001

My work of the past several years consists mostly of installations which usually involve kinetic, mechanical objects. Some of my pieces require that the viewer enter a certain space and operate a contraption. In some early pieces, an assigned operator works a machine while the viewer watches. In one piece, I rely instead on the viewer's ability to imagine an operator of the contraption, when given a few visual clues. Pieces currently in progress make use of simple mechanics to glorify mundane or anticlimactic situations.

With these pieces, I offer solutions for unidentifiable or nonexistent problems. I sometimes work "backwards," finding an example of contemporary technology and trying to simulate what it does with crude mechanics, assuming the role of a misguided and thoroughly unsuccessful inventor (of a "prior," but unspecified, era.) The pieces might be construed as proposals for "progress" that missed the mark and are now displayed as charmingly quirky oddities. Or perhaps they could be viewed as pessimistic predictions of a future (or critiques of a present) in which technology has gone awry. Most of these proposals offer relief from the burden of our having to perform even the smallest, most intuitive activities. Each contraption produces much more frustration than it alleviates, extracting all the pleasure and immediacy from the activity it is supposedly designed to facilitate.

In a piece from 1993 entitled "Demonstration," portions of a man's body are seen behind plexiglas in a wall. It is obvious that the man is in some way "engaging with a machine". The machine looks vaguely medical, and vaguely sporty, with its adapted bicycle brake levers. Although the operator is technically in control of this simple device, one gets the impression that the device is controlling him, and that he would need assistance extricating himself from the metal parts. For the three hours of the show's opening, he squeezed levers which gently separated two aluminum "lip pullers" and exposed his teeth. The piece is presented in the manner of a kinetic museum exhibit or instructional diorama. What exactly is being "demonstrated" is vague. As with most of these pieces, it is unclear whether the operator is using the device as a training tool to hone his own skills for the real world, or he is being tested while we watch. Or, perhaps, he has perfected the art of contending with this machine, and is teaching us how it is done.

A companion piece to "Demonstration" is a piece from 1994 called "Assessment". This installation was presented together with the other, installed in a wall and operated during the course of an opening. In this piece, I was the operator. I turned a crank at a slow, consistent speed, and this caused a rubber percussion hammer to strike my knee approximately every thirty seconds, testing my reflexes for three hours. The title of the piece suggests that the viewer's role is one of judging or evaluating my performance by observing how consistently my reflexes respond to the strike of the rubber hammer. Whether the device is therapeutic or punitive is uncertain.

A piece from 1995 is a play on the idea of the atrophied role of factory workers in mechanized, assembly-line workplaces during the inception of the phenomenon called "Scientific Management" in the early years of the 20th century. In this piece, entitled "Guide," the viewer is invited to step up to the installation and turn a crank. A person designated as the "chalk-holder" stands with her arm in an aluminum arm rest. When the viewer turns the crank, the arm holding the chalk moves jerkily up and down, while the blackboard moves from side to side at a different speed. The end result of this noisy, rambunctious activity is a random scribble on the blackboard. Like many a redundant and exploited factory worker, my "chalk-holder" is an absurd formality. The machine would function better without her, and she has a hard time keeping up with its relentless pace.

In 1998 I completed two of the pieces in a series of installations entitled "Toys." The first of these, "Toy: Jumping Rabbit," is something between a kinetic museum exhibit and a stage set. A lightweight helmet hangs about six feet above a small trampoline. A cable runs from the helmet to some metal parts, then some more parts, culminating in a tiny cast-metal toy rabbit. It is obvious that if one were to get up on the trampoline, don the helmet and jump, that the toy rabbit would be caused to also jump up and down within about a two-inch range. When I envision this system in use, I imagine a child watching the toy rabbit jump and being oblivious to the person and the system that is "remotely" powering the toy. The device created to facilitate, streamline, or regulate the jumping of a tiny toy rabbit would require a ridiculously disproportionate labour to operate, endanger the safety of its user, and make it impossible for him to even see the end result of his actions.

The second piece in the "Toys" series is an installation entitled "Toy: Collapsing Elephant." In this piece, the viewer is invited to operate a shiny, chromed lever which extends from a large box in the middle of a room. The viewer is facing two large video projections of a tiny plastic toy elephant. When he or she moves the "joystick" around, the elephant nods, bows, collapses, or wags its tail. On casual inspection, the piece appears to be some sort of "high-tech" video game. Only through the operation of the joystick does it become apparent that the machine consists of extremely "low-tech" mechanics. I envision the live video projections as surveillance views of the elephant. We control the elephant, but we can only see him in a virtual way. In the guise of progress, technology is merely complicating the simple act of playing with a hand-held toy, The device inside the box which controls the toy elephant remains a mystery to the viewer.

In the piece (soon to be completed) entitled "Day (Chicago, 1999)", the viewer may turn a small hand-crank while looking ahead into a science-museum style diorama. The result of the viewer's labour is rather anticlimactic: a dead branch rattles lightly against the inside of the diorama's window. The curved rear wall of the diorama is painted to suggest a mildly dreary winter sky. This piece, like some others still in progress, uses mechanics to crudely "simulate" a situation deemed by most people to be unworthy of simulation.