Hotel/Rooms
The series Hotel/Motel (The
Embodiment of Transience) envisages moments in
which material space and cultural space (the space of film,
of art, of literature) intersect with the person in
transition, the person inserted into space that is
culturally defined as impermanent — where the self on
holiday from the everyday may find, or perhaps create, new
possibilities.
The installation Rooms
with Woman (2006–7) engages the materiality of
self-construction within the apparent limitations or bounds
of the taken-for-granted. How powerful are the constraints
of the physical and cultural spaces that help to
define what we are and what we can be, and can those spaces
be bent or breached? Where does cultural construction of the
self end and something like genuine self-construction begin?
Rooms with woman
and three images from Hotel/Motel were exhibited in the 2007
CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival. Pre-installation
articles about the project were written by me
(commissioned by Utata.org) and Bryan
Partington.
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