Eden II: working drawing for Unseen Forces. Hand-drawn in ink with digital color
Airports, offices, malls, high schools: metal detectors are everywhere. There’s something both wonderful and awful about these dumb, clunky devices: they’re situated in such highly fraught but also totally mundane environments, in situations where masses of people must be processed and moved on quickly, efficiently and undramatically. We are now complicit, for the most part: we allow ourselves to be processed, and pass through.
In Unseen Forces, walk-thru metal detectors function as portals/thresholds into more otherworldly environments. The “landscapes” on each of the four gallery walls have specific points of reference, with two full-scale, sculptural metal detectors within the space being the objects tying these environments together.
The wall at left is a highly stripped-down reference to high school: lockers and classroom doors reduced to anonymous monolithic forms. Given my teaching background, I find the increasing pervasiveness of metal detectors in high schools a pretty dysfunctional thing to contend with in an educational environment.