Back in October I collaborated with Clare Torina and Jesse Cesario of Flyweight Projects on an exhibition in their miniature gallery. Here’s some writing and pictures:
Symbiogenesis is an offshoot of a larger body of work in which I created the living and working spaces of a husband and wife. The wife is a sculptor, a ceramicist. She works in a basement studio in a small, one bedroom duplex. Directly above the studio, in a living room turned home office, the husband works. He is a writer. Their work spaces are distinct, but there is a push pull, a bleed over. This is a story about collaboration, living with art, living with an artist, craft, and egos.
In Symbiogenesis, the objects in the gallery represent in a sense an exhibition of the wife’s work, but time and space are collapsed; the home has invaded the white cube. Piles of clothes wait to be folded, recycling asks to be taken out, a window appears in a smooth white wall opening onto a balcony garden. Saturating the gallery in blue light is a projection of an ethereal seascape, upon which float banal folder icons: “taxes” and “to do.” It is the husband’s computer desktop, swallowing the world.
*****
Who swallows who?
In evolutionary theory, symbiogenesis is the theory that complex single cell organisms evolved, in part, by absorbing other single cell organisms and continued to live in a symbiotic relationship. The classic example is that the mitochondria in all of our cells, which play such an essential role in cells’ functioning, used to be distinct, independent entities. All of what we are is built upon this initial partnership.
