The Floor is a Door
2020 and ongoing
multi media installation
2020 and ongoing
multi media installation
The Floor is a Door is an ongoing project.The work unfolds within a constructed set split into two levels: above, a reconstruction of a bedroom from my past, below, an underground chamber. Inside this space, I perform with replicas of the objects that surround me in daily life. Each object is remade as a hollow form, a vessel built to hold and release, rising, dripping, breaking irrevocably open. The performances are filmed and returned as a projected installation. So far, I have recorded five cross sections of the room and the ground beneath it.
Every object in my past bedroom is remade without hierarchy. A coffee cup. A hair tie. A photograph of a dead pet. A bed. A bureau. Working primarily in clay, I hollow each familiar object out until it becomes both a container and something much stranger. Their interiors are painted in fleshy pinks, suggesting something bodily, exposed, held just beneath the surface. Once completed, these forms are arranged across both levels of the set.
The upper space mirrors my bedroom, with light blue walls and beige carpet. A place of rest, intact but unstable. Below, the ground opens into a dense, earthen cavern, a site of burial and emergence. Before each performance, the objects above are filled with fake blood.
During the performance, I break them.
The vessels split. Blood spills across the room, moving through fragments, finding openings, slipping through the floor into the space below. There, it enters another set of forms. They take it in. They swell. Then they begin to rise. What was buried pushes upward, resurrecting itself from the dirt.
Each cross section is filmed individually. In the final installation, these fragments sit side by side in a continuous loop. The action repeats. It accumulates. It does not resolve.
The set takes the form of an altar. I work on my knees, moving through gestures of rupture and offering. Objects double across the two levels, held in a single current: the Hermetic axiom, as above, so below. Surface and depth press into one another, the seen slipping into the unseen and rising back through it. Nothing broken is lost. It shifts position. It descends and returns altered, still carrying its charge.
The movement of blood tracks like an hourglass, marking a transfer between states. The objects function as surrogates for the body. Their breaking reads as injury. Their return reads as refusal.
The work holds within a cycle of rupture and persistence. Violence and care remain entangled. What rises from the ground is not clean. It is swollen, reformed, sometimes grotesque and sometimes animate. Something like a body. Something that should not move, but does.
Something breaks. Something moves through. Something comes back anyway. And on and on.
Every object in my past bedroom is remade without hierarchy. A coffee cup. A hair tie. A photograph of a dead pet. A bed. A bureau. Working primarily in clay, I hollow each familiar object out until it becomes both a container and something much stranger. Their interiors are painted in fleshy pinks, suggesting something bodily, exposed, held just beneath the surface. Once completed, these forms are arranged across both levels of the set.
The upper space mirrors my bedroom, with light blue walls and beige carpet. A place of rest, intact but unstable. Below, the ground opens into a dense, earthen cavern, a site of burial and emergence. Before each performance, the objects above are filled with fake blood.
During the performance, I break them.
The vessels split. Blood spills across the room, moving through fragments, finding openings, slipping through the floor into the space below. There, it enters another set of forms. They take it in. They swell. Then they begin to rise. What was buried pushes upward, resurrecting itself from the dirt.
Each cross section is filmed individually. In the final installation, these fragments sit side by side in a continuous loop. The action repeats. It accumulates. It does not resolve.
The set takes the form of an altar. I work on my knees, moving through gestures of rupture and offering. Objects double across the two levels, held in a single current: the Hermetic axiom, as above, so below. Surface and depth press into one another, the seen slipping into the unseen and rising back through it. Nothing broken is lost. It shifts position. It descends and returns altered, still carrying its charge.
The movement of blood tracks like an hourglass, marking a transfer between states. The objects function as surrogates for the body. Their breaking reads as injury. Their return reads as refusal.
The work holds within a cycle of rupture and persistence. Violence and care remain entangled. What rises from the ground is not clean. It is swollen, reformed, sometimes grotesque and sometimes animate. Something like a body. Something that should not move, but does.
Something breaks. Something moves through. Something comes back anyway. And on and on.
The Floor is a Door, combined videos (left wall of room)
The Floor is a Door, details
The Floor is a Door, photographs of individual sculptural props
The Floor is a Door, photographs of illustrated model of final installation
I have recorded two video segment of "The Floor is a Door”. I will record videos of every part of the room, segment by segment, eventually making my way around the entire room. In the final installation, I plan to hire a contractor to build a room in a gallery and then I will project all the segments together on the walls of the room. The room in the final gallery installation will be the same size as my actual bedroom. I'll display the sculptural artifacts of the performance in another part of the gallery.
The Floor is a Door, digital rendering of final installation from an outside view
The Floor is a Door, in-progress photos
