Dancing From the Ceiling

Time and again I find myself contextualizing my work by looking at parallel installations. This comes after a visit to the ArtWorks in Trenton last Friday and discussions with its exhibition director and my engineer buddy on how to hang this work.

The top of the historic building is supported by an iron frame, not always criss-crossing in a place convenient to where I want my pieces to hang. So this leaves me looking for either a rigger to install scaffolding from which to hang nine 35-pound panels or modifying the grid above by joining metal tubing and hanging the pieces from there.

The video shows the ceiling of ArtWorks. While some think it's gonna be a snap to join pipe and hang the panels, I'm already losing sleep. However, while I was originally thinking of having the LED guys in China install long cable on the panels, I'm gonna instead have them install lengths of 3 meters (nine feet) . From there, I'll attach hooks. To the pipes above, I'd install heavy-duty cable, finishing with hooks.

Borrowing generously from the blog, thisiscolossal.com, I've looked at the eight or so pages of their entries, poring over the methods artists used for hanging works. A white grid hangs from the ceiling of an art museum in Istanbul from which hundreds of books suspend.

I'm not wild about this particular work attributed to Hanif Shoaei. [He also works as a photographer in his native Iran, and creates quite inspiring panoramic works--another of my weaknesses, but that's another conversation.] 

Visiting the link allows the viewer to move the full 360. http://www.360cities.net/image/on-diving-board-iran

Many other suspended works are shown Colossal, and many, quite beautiful. But, I lean toward suspended sculptures that can be interacted with by walking through. 

High on the list are the rope sculptures suspended outdoors by Italian sculptor Moneyless. More of his work can be seen at his gallery's website, http://www.unurth.com/Moneyless-San-Francisco-Oakland; as well as his own, www.moneyless.it. The image I've included just whets the appetite. His site shows his thought process through drawings and paintings, in which he fuses perfect geometry in the haphazard natural environment as a rite of purification. Lovely work. 

Returning to the reasons why SIS must be a suspended work is the need for the viewer to walk around the panels. The installation's intent is for the viewer to accomplish a number for tasks: on a basic level, they are needed to trip the sensors otherwise the installation is silent. On the conceptual level, this work is for the viewer, through the abstract media, to connect to a remote nuance in their past. Putting images on pedestals makes it [already said] pedestrian!

The exhibition director at ArtWorks had voiced concern about bringing a scaffold from which to suspend the works: Any kind of roof overhead would render the space claustrophobic and ruin the sensation of light-emitting rectangles floating in mid-air. 

He's right. I'm boxing with this as my Kickstarter gets off to a very slow start. [Sigh].