Residence Time, 2019 & 2021

Salt, glass beads, false eyelashes, latex, steel, motor

5’ L x 5’ W x 13’ H

Residence Time theory defines the average duration a substance or particle spends within a specific system, such as a chemical reactor, environmental reservoir, or biological organism. This mechanical sculpture slowly spun 27 ft latex arms in a circular motion, dragging the fingertips through cones of glass beads and salt. Over time the cones crumble allowing the gloves to become a hypnotic drawing machine. False eyelashes dot the sculpture, at times clinging to the latex fingers as they search through the salt composite.

Installed in The Red Wedding at RUSCHMAN gallery in Chicago, 2021

The Red Wedding marks the nuptials between the department store and the boudoir. Grand spaces of commerce are annexed with the softening of inner sanctums, are slinking spectrally toward obsolescence, are spreading out beside Benjamin’s arcades and his dandies. Here there be psychological corridors in which the feminine is practiced, maintained, regulated. Ancillary spaces occur: an adolescent bedroom, perhaps a closet, a wedding with no groom, the transactional zones of the art and cultural marketplaces. The works assembled throb with curiosity over the ways that identity has been produced as an effect of capital and exchange. Vestiges of gender conventions and the unstable ways they have been historically mapped across the category of Womxn, lounge and languish around this public toilette. In no particular order: evening gloves, effusive perfumes, bonbon wrappers, flower bouquets, millinery, magazines, twirling ribbon, an electric vibrator, dressing gowns, gowns, protest signs, false lashes, wives’ tales, blouses. Perhaps blouses most of all.

The Red Wedding is an exhibition on its period. It’s the Scarlet Witch. It’s a means by which we might m/other ourselves. It’s a beauty routine imitative of flushed desire. Under its auspices, the erotic as power and the valences of flirtation, fetish, sex education, feminist consciousness raising, drag, camp, queerness, and kink are arrayed as a brave if not sometimes unsteady politics.