Core Samples, 2000, C-print mounted to wood, melamine edging, h 16’ x w .5", destroyed, bottom image: detailed enlargement. Installed at Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn, NY for White Hot curated by Regine Basha and Moukhtar Kocache.
Core Samples catalogs the entirety of my high school cassette collection in miniature and presents it, in the spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Wunderkammer, with less an emphasis on categorization and a greater focus on unexpected juxtapositions.1 Similar cassette collections of several key high school era friends are included to indicate the collective musical findings of a time period. I am interested in paying homage to obsolete technology and taste.
For this sculptural manifestation of Core Samples, verticality, as well as references to archaeological measuring devices, and geologic stratification, are enhanced by compressing the piece to the width of one cassette stack (from the width of fourteen in Core Samples for Cabinet Magazine), proportionally yielding a slender, sixteen foot tall sculpture. The piece is installed discretely amongst the gallery plumbing and electrical conduits in Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
1 Adalgisa Lugli, a contemporary Italian art historian, writing on Inquiry as Collection notes wryly how the seventeenth century museum “was still conceived as a place where... one could move about without having to solve or face the problem of continuity.” – Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, New York: Vintage Books, 1995; p. 83
