SLOW ROOM
A living room is slowly pulled into a hole over the course of a month
We live in the constant now. Information of the past is a narrative that cannot be completely known. The future is imagined but uncertain. We are drawn through time slowly and only a few facts seem certain. Our narrative will end at some point, exactly how and where, and why are unknown. What we will be after that point is subject to superstition and speculation.
Artwork attempts to subvert this movement of time. The artist, by placing their ideas into a durable object, imagines they will attain a sort of immortality. This immortality seems impressive in human terms. What is the lifetime of a painting, sculpture? A human lifespan judged in decades may be translated into centuries.
Everything is in fact in motion. The molecules within a painting are moving. Temperature, minute chemical reactions, and the quantum all make changes. The world is moving around our ideas. What the world thinks of the nude or the bowl of fruit changes with each passing regime.
The museum is a further attempt at attaining stasis. To control the environment, to control the thoughts that are allowed within the hallowed white walls, prolongs the lifespan of art and the ideas contained within the marble, paint, and plaster.
To bring a life form to a singular lack of motion is to kill it. Museums are repositories of the past. Ideas that lived outside are rendered dead in the careful buildings. Just as dead as the grizzly in the diorama at the Met is the Lichtenstein at the MoMA. The ideas reach a peak and trade their vitality, their life, for an expanded lifespan.
The SLOW ROOM was envisioned as an answer to this dilemma... to be in motion to live and die in the museum... to be a part of the system while denying and rejecting the stasis… to embrace the chaos to make the entropy an ally is to understand a fundamental nature of the Universe. SLOW ROOM will live and it will die.
