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Free Kittens was an exhibition of individual
works by collective FREE KITTENS which included: Cooper Battersby,
Emily Vey Duke, Stephen Clayton Ellwood, Paul Greenlaw, and
Goody-B. Wiseman
Pieces in FREE KITTENS
This is Your Day
Cast iron, 5 x 6 x 3 feet, 2000
300 Page Love Poem
paper, 300 8.5" X 11" books on bookshelf, 1 x 7 feet,
2000
My premise as coordinator of FREE KITTENS
was that a group of similarly minded people in an entangled
social web would exhibit together works which shared as their
themes: language, desire, loss and sentimentality.
The works produced all used similar
linguistic strategies in their delivery: disclosure, deceit,
personal narrative, and rhetoric.
In this show I exhibited two sculptures.
The first was a cast iron bed covered in cast iron tiles with
backwards raised lettering for imprinting a rising sun and the
text "THIS IS YOUR DAY" onto the potential sleeper.
The bed was designed to humorously
challenge the normative expectations of a society bent on homogenizing
people and experience. This bed suggests that I suspect that
there is the full potential of waking up to a truly shitty day
where I don't fit in and don't find glory or even comfort.
My second piece in the exhibition was
a set of 300 books, all visually identical when viewed on the
shelf, but textually each one had a different phrase running
through it differently on each page.
The books in this exhibition are filled
with 300 propositions, statements borrowing the logical structure
of the Universal Subjective, where each statement categorizes,
identifies, fixes, or accuses the reader.Each of the books had
a different text, each was 75 pages with a plain white cover.
Each page was different as the text snaked its way through the
book, making 22,500 unique pages in the piece. The piece on
first approach seems to be a monolith of white surface denying
text to the reader, but once penetrated, the reader finds themselves
overwhelmed with poetic yet totalizing pronouncements which
deny them fluid subjecthood.This project sought to mine the
brutality of language. |
