Shadows kept separate, shy of the light

Shadows kept separate, shy of the light are two parallel projects; two concurrent, adjacent, and linked exhibitions sharing a common title. The same name referring to two different states, inhabiting two different areas at a single location. Passing through two rooms that were once examination rooms or emergency rooms, now guided by neon, or protected by Cerberus. Guided to the damned.

Experiencing transitions, both artists take their shared relocation and dislocations as starting points for these installations. Searching for grounding or meaning in these transitions is both subject and object here; their spaces of dislocation are populated with confusion, anxiety, deceit, and fatigue. Some of the objects here you’ve seen before, like ghosts; fragments isolated and arranged. Some are markers and some are not. Guardians with chattering teeth looking in three directions at once, dispelling hope and pointing towards any ways out. Bits and pieces of past lives arranged on the walls, strewn on the floor. Neon DRIVE THRU OPEN 24 HOURS.

Maybe those two rocks were transported out of the Nevada Test Site. Maybe those wooden skewers were picked up in a roadside graveyard in rural Michigan. Not marking graves, but marking an area that marks graves. Maybe the metal tie binding the skewers was picked up from a park in downtown Chicago dedicated to cancer survivors. Maybe it wasn’t. Could the swollen, pulped paper pad actually have been recovered from the infamous grassy knoll in Dallas or that jacket pulled off a bus driver at Kent State? A single sequin picked off the floor of the Liberace Museum? Crumpled, embossed stationery from Golden Nugget covered with glossy graphite strokes—homemade graphite nuggets? Glass lenses magnifying nothing, or maybe magnifying magnification. Plastic bags scrawled with the names of unwitting (or witting) former prisoners housing objects perhaps never associated with them. Or perhaps the articles contained are the reason they were incarcerated (or released). Do any of these hold the key? Are they the key?

Press release for 5th Wall Gallery, Las Vegas, NV. Opening November 2, 2012.