THRESHOLDS

THRESHOLDS  (1990)  

Photo-collages (and video) of a site-specific installation at the Prairie Avenue Historic Mansion Gallery in Chicago.

For me, thresholds are passageways to envisioning other realities. You can choose to cross-over or not. In that way my work can be confrontational. If you do cross-over, you will enter another dimension.

The photo-collages juxtapose different points of view simultaneously, a sort of jumble that can be disorienting. I require something of the viewer to be a risk-taker and enter an unfamiliar space. Where are you? What are you looking at?

When I was 4 years old, I experienced being able to look out the bedroom window which was on an angle to the house. I saw not only outside into the garden, but into the living room window while being in the bedroom looking out the window. This field of “possibilities” is amazing to a child, and it became the major focus of my art-making. 

“Thresholds” was created on site to explore the idea of how we can enter the “fourth dimension” incorporating a larger reality superceding ordinary reality. There were three sets of doorways - one with screen doors;  one with glass revolving doors; and one with wooden doors on a ramp. The door constructions could all be entered (See Video). 

There were three rooms for the puzzling exhibit, which included ladders, bones, tree parts, a fireplace (extruding a “river of fabric” across a parquet wooden floor); a red stairway to a window surrounded by “Found Objects Self-Possessed”; and the first presentation of my interactive rearrangeable stacked paintings.

What remains are these jumbled photocollages, and the “Found Objects Self-Possessed”. The rest has been destroyed. The temporary, transitory nature of life is one of the underlying themes in my work.