caverns of the no-life

1962-2018

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caverns of the no-life moves between sculpture, text, and photography to build an immersive physical environment in which exploratory, critical forms of identity can be both mined and curated. the cavern is constructed using both vernacular and literary materials to examine the social need for a narrative of selfhood that is both domestic and cultural, as well as to examine the conditions of autobiography as a social medium in our contemporary cultural moment. this work was originally prompted by a personal need to process my relationship to the lives and deaths of significant family members, as well as the two years I spent working for facebook as a content analyst, and became a method for examining the space between private and public memory (and to what extent those experiences are transmissible to others).

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the images above document the first iteration of the immersive space built in my graduate studio and the individual vernacular images and text can be viewed below.

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references: 

Roger Laurent, A Season For All Things

Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing

Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva

Ava Kofman, Not the Word, But the Thing Itself

Elena Carrera, Reading From the Whale's Belly

Rebecca Solnit, The Blue of Distance

Henriette Steiner, Surface As Screen and Performative Monuments

Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art