C.A.G.E.
2013
HD video projection
20 mins 34 sec
2013
Steel, horse martingale, headrest DVD player
82 x 54.5 x 57 in
2012
Bees wax, salt, rubberized upholstery coir, clay, resin, steel, plexiglass, guitar strings, tuners
67 x 56 x 45 in
2012
wax, rubberized upholstery coir, steel, fishing weights, thread
30 x 98 x 35 in
2013
Steel, plaster, fishing line, resin, ice, thread, wood
72 x 41 x 17 in
C.A.G.E. is an experimental short film and series of sculptures inspired by the film’s issues, locations and materials.
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C.A.G.E. the film is narrated by actor Sam Andoe. It is a fictional documentary about ‘Variations on a Plain Index,’ a 1945 sound work by an unnamed experimental composer.
C.A.G.E. is a subtle and philosophical story about an artist’s relationship to their environment and how component elements of an artwork can represent subjective states of mind.
C.A.G.E. refers to a psychological or physical cage, to the notes C, A, G and E, which make up the final noise, the structural experiments of John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Marcel Broodthaers and the names of the mine shafts in Skidoo Mine, Death Valley.
Shot in Utah, California and Evans’ New York studio, the film concentrates on a fictional composer’s fascination with landscape. It describes how that becomes both the inspiration and the material for the sound work.
The composer records the wind in an old forest in Capitol Reef National Park and then plays that recording in disused mine shafts in Death Valley using a multi-channel recording process. Here the channels are not electronic but physical mine shafts. The noise of the wind is played and then re-recorded in the mines. The resulting sound work is a sonic description of the shafts’ history, volume, and materiality, a representation of the troubled culture and history of the mine and an elegy to the horrific past of the dead forest.
The film follows the sound work through natural, electrical, mechanical, geological, and acoustic stages. These state changes are echoed in the levels of the ‘family tree score,’ the system used to make the recordings in the mine. This process involves pairing up recordings made in several mines, re-pairing and re-recording them until there is only one recording.
This single recording is encased in plastic and ‘exhibited’ in an unmanned electrical substation. This sound is a physical distillation of identity, history, landscape, process and technology.
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Conglomer8’s title is a sound symbol where the word’s pronunciation implies a meaning in the work; compression, form, industry, liquid, travel and balance. The video is a looped film of water flowing through the 400M deep Narrows Canyon in Zion national park as featured in the film C.A.G.E. The inverted video contrasts the canyon wall with the fragility of the river. The video is displayed on a car’s headrest DVD monitor, bolted to one of the sculpture’s steel rods. This rod is a balance and is one of the many branches of the tree-like sculpture. All the connecting steel branches are plugged into the DVD player resembling an antenna.
A horse’s martingale is draped on the other side of the structure to physically and metaphorically balance the monitor. The polished leather and the car’s head-rest DVD monitor allude to different ideas concerning travel and fantasy.
Each horizontal rod pivots on a point that rests on another rod. The rod is balanced on both sides by vertical rods of varying lengths and weights. The rods are adjusted to find the correct balance. The sculpture is a vertical free-standing mobile. It is a reversed mobile, as highlighted in the inverted video. Its tree-like form exploits the steel’s aesthetic qualities of weight and angular shape, the opposite of traditional ceiling hanging mobiles such as Calder’s colourful and curvy constructions.
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In ‘bad.water’ elements from Bad Water Basin in Death Valley (the lowest point in North America) that feature in the film, C.A.G.E. are re-arranged and presented on a steel structure. Salt was collected and added to beeswax that was sculpted onto the central body of the work. The sculpture is an abstract psychogeographic rendering of the site, tied together with guitar strings as used in the soundtrack for C.A.G.E.
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tik_tik’s textures are taken from the sandstone surfaces of the Les Gorge du Pont du Diable (Devil’s Gorge) in the Haute-Savoie region of France. They are sculpted on furniture coir (furniture stuffing) stitched onto a steel structure. The sculpture is an abstract figure, loosely based on a form from the science fiction illustrator Richard Powers. Like many sculptures, the steel armature is like the bones, the coir the muscle and the wax the flesh.
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Kayakoy is a ghost town on the border between Greece and Turkey. It became deserted due to the 1923 population exchange where residents of each country were re-located according to religion.
This ‘figurative’ sculpture presents objects copied from images of archaeological finds in the ghost town. These were cast in ice and melted over the duration of the exhibition. The ropes holding the top part of the sculpture together are cast in plaster and have no structural function but give the aesthetic of opposing tensions between different parts of the sculpture.
The Damocles like ice sword hangs suspended by two pieces of steel, trapped in its nook by a thread. Slowly the sword melts. The sword of Damocles was hung over Damocles’s head, suspended by a single strand of horsehair. The story’s moral was an allusion to the ever-present peril hanging over those in power.
