MY OBSESSION

curator's(Richard Gess) statement:

media: books from artist's personal library. VHS, auido, furniture, personal documentation and memorabilia,

wire, cable, mirror, concrete sphere.

Spin: The Melancholiac sunk like stone in his overstuffed librabrary. The dolor of Dürer. As with other works

in the show, a televsision plays continuously: the voice that never shuts up, the mind that cannot sleep. Not

that sleep would necessarily help; in the grip of obsession there's a deep dread of inattention,

of going off watch. Lines like those in Renaissance demonstrations of perspective cross-reference the titles on the shelves, never intersecting with

the occupant of the chair.

Who (go ahead, antrhopomorphize) nests in texts delineating his origins. Who can only observe the repetitions on the tube

(looking forward) or the image of his own chair in the mirror (looking up; his own image is preempted by his own birth certificate).

None of the myriad books can lift him from the lounger, the womb we may still reside in at the bottom of our personalities. where the womb may

function more as inescapable prison than shelter.

Lots of fuel for runimation. But the opportunities for metaphor-slinging, no matter

how far pursued, fall well slhort of good paraphrase. After a lot of revisitng you might feel yourself swinging

back to sunk. The feeling of being underneath the with of

your whole long life, stacked atop your infancy first.