#spatialpractices

Robert Gober, Untitled leg, 1989-90, beeswax, cotton, wood, leather,human hair, 11 3/8 x 7 3/4 x 20″

Robert Gober, Untitled (sink), 1984, plaster, wood, wire lath, aluminum, watercolor, semi-gloss enamel paint, 28 x 33 x 22 1/2′

Robert Gober, Red Shoe, 1990, red casting wax, 7.75 x 3 x 3″

Robert Gober, Untitled (Newspaper Stack), 1993, photolithography and twine, 6 x 16 x 3 x 13.3″

Thinking on Gaston Bachelard's, the Poetics of Space, specifically the section on doors, I was struck with the idea of inside and out as a space of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Specifically, my intent was to create a space that encompassed the negative rather than the positive space, creating a claustrophobic space, one where you are tunneled inside rather than allowing you to navigate around the sculptural installation.

 1. Corners: QCQ 

2. Corners: Research 

1.  2.  3. 

3. Corners: Final 

4. The Dialects of Outside and Inside: QCQ 

5. Door - The Dialects of Outside and Inside: Research 

Recently I have been exploring the tactile properties of silicone caulking as a medium for artmaking. I specifically am attracted to its sense of fluidity and durability. Personally it has connection to an urban sensibility as well as a modern one. I am looking to explore further as both a 2-d and 3-d material.

Even figuratively, nothing that concerns intimacy can be shut in, nor is it possible to fit into one another, for purposes of designating depth, impressions that continue to surge up.

I was thinking of interior doors as a moment of introspection looking interiorly as opposed to exterior video eye monitor. We are always looking outside our doors to view an exterior (possibly threat). I wanted to position the viewer to look inside. 

Q: We must be free as regards all definitive intuitions-and geometrism records definitive intuitions

C: The idea that physical space limits our internal space, is a very interesting, if diametrically opposed idea. Can we as artists challenge the idea of what constitutes physical space and how we understand its limitations. Can a door mean more than just a separation of space? Where does inside and outside begin and end? I think this is a great problem to work towards unravelling. Many artists have already approached the concepts of what defines spaces. I recall a movie that, although absurd in its premise (it was a comedy), the inhabitants of a hippie commune did away with all the doors so that space flowed from one room to another unobstructed. The private became shared and division were done away with. Or artists who record interior space as memory by recreating the internal space as outer.

Q: How can we reimagine the space between here and there? Doors are so metaphorically charged the questions. Do they have a central point where one can find a center? I have no easy answer for this conundrum.