THESE EYES HAVE WALLS
Evelena Ruether
The spaces that we find familiar carry a history that is unfamiliar. Years of time become layers, concealed and compiled onto each other to create a surface of the present that is indistinguishable from the past. The purity of a white wall creates a blank slate, and erases what has come before. The gallery is the most common space for this activity, but it is not alone. A landlord will put up a fresh coat of paint and we will forget that someone else lived here, slept here, and has moved on. Our perception of the “new” is constantly shifting, while layers of use pile up on one another. By observation it is possible to examine how we engage and perceive a lived history and the experience of a space.
While a wall holds the potential to become an object, it is more often taken for granted. What happens when a wall is taken out of its context and occupies a new space? What happens to the site specificity when the remnants of a building enter the gallery? This gesture occurs often within photography. We are ripping a physical trace of a real thing and lending it to a viewer, filtered through a set of actions and conditions to allow a sharing of a place and a time that could otherwise only exist for a few, without the opportunity to be analyzed.
These spaces of division or transition offer a new way to experience what may seem well known from long or close association. The reference to the “real” becomes muddled in the conflation of sculpture and photography. The indexical nature of the photograph leads us to think of the existence of these things out in the world, yet the new object that is created lets us experience it as something entirely different, or “new”. Our response to images through a default set of readings can lead into a territory of apprehension when disruptions occur. Mediated and relocated through a pictorial device, to literalize is at once to simplify and complicate.
The walls in this room create privacy from the people and sounds in the next, and a ceiling is either a shelter or barrier. These are devices to keep us separate, private, and we put trust in them to protect us, to be unfailing. Things are happening all around us that are easy to ignore because these spaces are defined. But what has happened in the room before you entered, and what will happen long after you leave is left unconsidered.
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The Reveal is an architectural flourish where the drywall “floats” a few inches above the floor, leaving a cutaway where you’d expect to see a baseboard. The idea was that you rested the sheetrock on a two-by-four and poured the floor. When you took the two-by-four away, it looks like the wall is floating. It is a detail that is very hard to get right, and very expensive and always looks wrong because materials contract and expand at different rates. Plus the vacuum cleaner dings it up. Which is what most likely lead to black moldings being used in this space, as you will find around most of art center.
I have revealed the reveal.
This treatment has also been applied to the structural beam.
