During the 2007-2008 global financial crises, I traveled around Los Angeles taking down and collecting channel letters from corporate and local businesses that went bankrupt. Channel letters are the letters on the front façade of a building advertising the name of a business with either neon or LED lights housed inside metals casing with plastic covering. Some of these businesses included Linens 'n Things, Circuit City, Chevron, Mervyns, and local nail and spa businesses.
The presidential election was heightened with ideology and political rhetoric at the end of 2008. As with every election people demand change within the status quo through the electoral process. Using these metal channel letters as molds, I created life size candles, spelling the word “change” with red wax. I chose the word "change" as a multi-layered exploration into the ambiguous and symbolic violent nature that language has one our psyche along with the political undertones it had undertaken and the nature in which language become malleable over the course of human evolution. Another element was the audience members seeing “change” happen as they watched letters of the same name melt, added subtle humor.
It took me 3 years to complete this project and one night to come to fruition. Polarities, Mysteries and Unpredictablities, 2010 sat on a wooden trough to collect the remaining melted wax. The wooden trough additionally sat on a metal frame. The candling lighting ceremony (live performance) accompanied an installation of all the metal letters I collected, Here’s your heap, 2010 a play off Robert Smithson A Heap of Language, 1966, and a large wall text drawing about how western culture anthropomorphizes time. An excerpt on the invitation read “This candling lighting ceremony (live performance), will attempt to revive these abandoned words, and achieve empirical and contiguous polarities, reflecting on the ambiguous nature of language in relation to the current (ending) economic recession. How does a word radiate time? What patterns can emerge in that space?”
This performance was also held in an former photography gallery, Drkrkm Gallery. The owners had to vacate due to back rent thus further expanding site specificy in relation to the exhibition.
More Info:
Date: Oct 10th, 2010, Los Angeles, CA
Medium: Mixed-Media | Installation | Performance | Performative | Drawing
2007-2010, wax, wood, chicken wire, and metal, dimension variable, channel letters collected from 2007-2008 financial crises,mixed media on paper, 120" x 48".
