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Anonymous Steel Worker | Anonymous Steel Worker | Ceasural 1 | Ceasural 2 | 1986 |
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Just Passed Harmony | Just Passed Harmony | View 1 | VIew 2 | View 3 |
Installation with Telephone pole, video projections, enamel screen print on stainless steel, enamel screen prints on acrylic, digital ink-jet on galvanized steel, digital screen, clocks, fiberglass insulation, paint. |
"The hours, marked by sirens, grow thin with age. Every factory has a time book. The time book is an index of the value of a worker's time. It records hours, minutes and money, and acts as the memory machine of a factory. A resurrected telephone pole curves an airy diagonal in time. Messages, once transmitted from its trunk, scatter across like busy ciphers, whispering, working. A curious ornamental creature in fiery orange shines on stainless steel, remembering an inventive steel worker's stolen leisure. Roads snake to several nowheres, perhaps passing towns called Harmony, Industry, Enterprise, Economy. Clocks stand frozen at the moment of the sounding of the last siren. A strange illumination hovers close to the ground. 'Time Book' stands poised between resilient memory and grateful amnesia. Detailed Description of Time Book Hanging on the wall across from the entrance are four non-working factory time clocks. The hand of each clock is set to the digits: 1-9-8-6, the year a number of steel mills in the area closed. An old telephone pole rest at a 60-degree angle with one end mounted to the floor and the other end mounted to a beam in the ceiling. A light bulb hangs from the high end of the pole almost reaching the floor. Beyond the pole a sheet of stainless steel hangs from the beam with a silk screened orange image of a sculpture made by a steel worker. The lower parts of the windows are silk-screened with images of industrial ductwork and rust stains. The upper parts remain clear showing the skyline of the hillside. A flat screen plays multiple stills of an image taken inside an abandoned steel mill. Video projections on sheets of steel contain images of 1930s archival photographs of Carrie Furnace and Homestead Works. Another shows images simultaneously divided in half like the frame of a window- the upper half of the video, abandoned steel mill reclaimed by nature, the bottom half shows smoke from a factory billowing in the sky. To the right of the entrance hangs a long rectangular aluminium panel with 19 silk-screened images of the surface of a road. The far window shows a silk-screened image of a broken window frame from an old steel mill in the lower frame of the window. The above frame is clear with a view of Pittsburgh's skyline buildings. A portion of the fire escape in view is painted metallic silver. From an interview at the Mattress Factory with Raqs: "We are most interested in the texture of memory. How it is lined, what kinds of stains and blots and markings - like the telephone pole. It's not a smooth structure anymore. Time has layered it. The work has many different ways of trying to understand what we see in Pittsburgh now. All the things we have collected have the texture of an imprint. What we are trying to do is to present a consideration on the delusion of the permanence of anything." |
Shown at: Anonymous Steel Worker and Just Passed Harmony shown at Aicon Gallery London, October 2007 Ceasural 1 and Ceasural 2 shown at Art & Capital: Spirtual Odyssey, Gallery Loop, Seoul, February 2008 |
