For more info, images, and related writings (that were available during the opening) please check out this: EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
place where, before, In A In is an installation and performance rooted in potentials of the still life: fruit, products and waste, leftovers, queer shapes and sounds situated in relationship to the ownership of materials and land. Visual boundaries, such as fences and buildings, create divides in experience that often impact people’s sense of belonging, commonality, place, and behavior within shared geographies. These forms of still life that overlap between the American exotic and mundane provide an alternate experience with materials that are understood in limited ways through use and consumption.
The Installation in the image above is inspired by photographs of the Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Public Housing Projects as they were being torn down in 2006, while the neighborhood nearby was being gentrified. The tearing down revealed the personalized colors of people’s homes painted on cinder blocks. This was the end of an era of significant social projects for low income Americans, symbolizing the rise and fall of public housing as a political priority that began with the New Deal’s PWA building projects to fight poverty as a social and economic injustice.
Do we dream in the same light?
A video of the moon viewed behind a window screen captures the anonymity of a viewer and traces of a domestic space. The sense of a missing individual behind the camera points to an interior life determined by constraints from the architecture of a home. A still life. This is a distancing of the personal—not drained of meaning but infused with a relative isolation by the effects of physical, social, and psychological spatial divisions. A still life provides an experience of place where the coherence of social hierarchies can be clarified and expanded, a challenge to the cultural desire of freedom and individuation, and a look into disempowering forces of isolation.
Performance Documentation
developed and performed in collaboration with Bacabaya
Torrance Art Museum
Installation, performance, and publication
Curated by Ben Tippin
Publication and Catalogue contributions: Curatorial writing by Ben Tippin, hand drawings by Bacabaya, writings and digital drawings by Kim Zumfe,
Installation & Performance Photo credit: Christopher Wormald
Kim Zumpfe 