dolphinhotel, 72 in h x 124 in wr

I’ve been struggling with the layout of this piece for a couple of years. It’s at a temporary resting point, but I may yet dismantle it and try again.

The structure is informed by a postcard I picked up in the Arctic Circle in Norway a few years ago: 9 slivers of a time-lapse scene of the sun dipping down then arcing back up, not setting. The sun is mirrored in the sea below. The foreboding black ornamentation is a stylized version of the Madonna Inn logo. The Madonna Inn is a hotel in San Luis Obispo that is something like my spiritual home: goofy and extravagant and imaginative to the extreme. There are 24 small circle illustrations rising and setting across the piece: each one mirrors or references something in another, all of which add up to a general sense of the inside and outside of some unknown place. There are multiple binaries and oppositions in the imagery.

The title refers to a hotel that appears in two Haruki Murakami novels; A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance. This piece is not at all an illustration of these novels, however. It’s much more about trying to tap into that indefinable, weird, murky imagination that pervades his writing, and my own compulsive attachments to similarly compelling qualities I experience whenever I’m traveling, or in transition in some significant way. Hotels are really satisfying liminal spaces in this regard.