Living Room (NS 00)

2017
2-channel HD video, color, sound; 36 min.

Living Room, the second episode of Negative Space, explores various conceptions of the body and humanity’s challenge to maintain sanity and subsistence.

In the video, various spaces in a dilapidated apartment building provide an allegorical map of human anatomy. Representing the psyche or imagination, three children play on multiple couches within an expansive living room. Here, they act out a make-believe world where they become a bird of prey, fish out-of-water and swat at taunting voices in a mad frenzy and ultimately destroy the couches they inhabit.

The kidneys are articulated as a bathroom where two performers attempt to detox and recuperate from “socio- political illnesses.” This scene ultimately becomes a satirical remake of Death of Marat, a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David about the murder of a French revolutionary.

The digestive tract is represented by two performers descending a stairwell—from the roof to basement—as they haul increasing loads of garbage and pieces of the destroyed couch. As they haul the waste to the lowest point in the building we open to scene in the basement where the inner workings of the building are exposed. Water pipes, heat and electricity make it a highly generative site where the circulatory system becomes a metaphor for apolitical movement. Here performers dance in and out of sync wearing T-shirts that bear text fragments including “Or Bust,” “Her,” and “Again” to recuperate overused language from slogans in the 2016 United States presidential election.

By exposing the substructure of the walls, the installation makes the site of the exhibition explicit as a constructed space and resembles a domestic space in the process of being deconstructed. The left channel of Living Room is projected onto a wall with partially exposed studs; the right channel is projected onto a propped piece of unused drywall. The floor is carpeted and a gutted couch wrapped in plastic protective covering is illuminated from below like a tricked-out car.