Octagonal room
Exterior: wall paint, vinyl text, inkjet prints, 12
min DVD video loop
Interior:
wall paint, 8 photographs 13" x 26", 4 pivoting mirrors 13" x 26",
18 min DVD video loop
Sightlines is an immersive environment layered with mythologies, psychologies, and politics, where the viewer becomes partner to cross-historical and cross-cultural variables, where relations are manifestly interdependent and cultural identities are not separate from one another. Who is seeing and who is seen? Whose memory? Whose history? Where is reciprocity between oneself and another, between history, memory, myth and desire?
In Summer 2001, I read an article in the New York Times about Dr. Irma Rodriguez, a forensic scientist working on the many unsolved kidnappings and murders of young women in the desert around Juarez, Mexico. Dr. Rodriguez had finessed a way of re-creating sculptural likenesses of these murder victims whose identities had been erased. I was deeply moved and compelled by her abilities to transform human absence into presence.
In Spring 2002, more than a year into the current Intifada between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, a cover of Newsweek Magazine depicted the double portrait of a young Palestinian woman, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and one of the Jewish Israelis killed with her in the blast, a young woman who looked very much like the bomber. Their mirroring of otherness was very palpable. Both women were disappeared by the blast. How did one see the other? How do these two seemingly disparate cultural violences, Mexican and Middle Eastern, strangely the same while different, worlds apart geographically as well as in their respective confounding and incomprehensible natures, become conflated and reconstituted in the mind and heart of a reader?
In November 2003, I sought and found Dr. Irma Rodriguez and invited her to forensically sculpt the heads of the two Middle Eastern women following the cover photo from Newsweek Magazine. Fascinated by my request, Dr. Rodriguez invited me to her home in Chihuahua, Mexico to assist her in the completion of the heads of oil clay. These heads, Semitic in their nature, also took on the uncanny reflection of their Mexican maker, Dr. Irma Rodriguez. My fascination was held most by the human gaze with which we were able to shape their eyes adding a haunting human psychology to their funereal clayness. In the summer of 2004, I created a series of photographic portraits of these sculpted heads focusing on the specific gaze each woman holds towards the other.
In April 2004 and December 2005, I traveled to Death Valley, California, to visit Zabriski Point, an expansive desert canyon made famous in the 1930's by an American industrialist who excavated the land through Borax mining. Strangely, as though land excavation was an obsession, Zabriski was also a mortician, preparing the dead for burial. In 1974, the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni immortalized this site in his film Zabriski Point, slowly panning his camera across this seemingly dead landscape to reveal the living bodies of rebellious American youth making love in the earthen dust. I re-filmed this same landscape for installation within Sightlines. In my filmed version, the desert represents itself as an open, excavated body, empty and full, vastly absent while utterly present.
On entering an octagonal shaped, clay brown painted room, the viewer physically moves through shifting relationships between what and how one sees. Several photographs, each one portraying the clay head of one of two Middle Eastern women, each with her gaze fixed outside the frame of the photograph, reflect and deflect each other. Mirrors placed through the space become witnesses capturing reflections of the photographic heads as well as those of the viewers, revealing all as complicit and interdependent through the act of looking. A slow pan of a desert landscape, empty and compelling, is presented on video. Along the outer walls of the room, the viewer is invited to follow a circuitous five-year time line, describing the artist's journey from newspaper clippings, to Chihuahua, Mexico, to Death Valley, California. While this outer journey tries to join the dots of an unfathomable tale, witnessing and remembering, the work within the room opens to what cannot be spoken, the sublime.