Off-Centered Consequences

Roger Feldman

THE gallery had been a YWCA designed in the early twentieth century by California architect Julia Morgan. The museum had recently acquired the building, which originally housed an indoor swimming pool. They filled the pool with rubble, leveled it with concrete, carpeted, and built walls. The result was an open, light-filled space with exposed ductwork and high walls. The surrounding neighborhood was tense, having experienced a number of conflicts based largely on ethnic and class issues. In many ways the place was a microcosm of larger social tensions, the kind that make Southern California a bellwether for the rest of the country. I decided to focus my installation on these tensions. In the building archives I found a photo of the original pool from the twenties or thirties. Over the diving board hung a banner that read, Anything You Do Here Is At Your Own Risk. As soon as I saw it, I knew this had to be the installation title. The piece measured sixteen feet high, sixty feet long, and twenty-four feet wide, and was comprised of eight large segments, each an installation in itself. A lumberyard donated the materials. Because the museum was on a tight budget, they had cut the power to the air conditioning. I labored on in the heat, walking on water, dripping with sweat, using enough lumber to build a small house.

Almost all my work is temporary. When a show ends, an installation is taken apart and the lumber goes on to another project, mine or someone else’s. I’m always happy when my materials can be recycled—an attitude that grew out of a number of personal experiences. Before I was married, an avalanche destroyed a number of cabins near my mother and father-in-law’s property at one of the mountain passes in Washington state. While their cabin was virtually untouched, the couple next door was killed in their sleep, their young children surviving in an air pocket. My father-in-law, a contractor, hired a friend and me to salvage the lumber from the scene, which we used on another cabin in the flatlands. He had come from Norway, lived through the Great Depression and Nazi occupation, and had a powerful aversion to waste—a trait that my parents also possessed. By recycling the wood after the tragedy, we could see the beginnings of its redemption. I began to understand then that all materials have histories.

On a less exalted plane, I had another motive for recycling lumber. Building large structures takes a lot of money, and early in my career, before I started getting grants, I’d work to save up for materials, with help from friends. Every time I took down an installation, I’d store the wood away for the next project. My studio kept getting smaller and smaller. When it was time to dismantle the installation over the former swimming pool at the Riverside Art Museum, some of the lumber went to the house of an artist friend to make the stud walls for an addition.

The installation movement in New York and Los Angeles began in the late sixties in reaction to the commercialization of the gallery system, which increasingly treated art objects as commodities. Installations allowed artists to make work that engaged large amounts of physical and conceptual space but couldn’t be bought or sold. The medium is temporary in nature: you use a lot of time, effort, and material to make a piece, and then after the show you dismantle it, a process that mirrors the transitory nature of our own time on earth. As Jesus said, we are blades of grass, withering flowers. By now I’ve been using some of the same wood for years, and I’ve come to believe more and more in the theological dimension of this process. Materials have a history, and when I take materials meant for a specific purpose and re-use them for something else, I’m reshaping that history. Christ entered history, worked within an existing context, and re-formed that context. By recycling materials, I believe I’m mimicking the way Christ reconstitutes us for new purposes.

After we graduated from university, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I trained to work as mountain climbing guides in the British Columbia Coast Range with Young Life. One of the first things I had to learn was how to rappel down a rock face. Roped around my waist by a nylon harness, I was supposed to lean back, keep my feet slightly spread and my body perpendicular to the mountain face, let small amounts of rope through my hands, and bounce myself down the cliff. Once I got into position, I could see all the way to the bottom. If the rope broke, or if the person holding the other end made a mistake, I’d have a long way to fall. I knew that the rope was sound, and that the trainers at the bottom knew what they were doing, but my instinct was to keep my head pointing up and my feet pointing down, so that if I fell I’d break my legs and not my neck—even though I knew falling was virtually impossible. It took a lot of internal arguing to plant my feet on the face and start letting out rope. As I leaned backward, my whole body was telling me to stay vertical. My body knew the angle was all wrong. But after a few moments of intense unease I began to feel a little more secure. I started getting used to being horizontal in mid-air. I pushed off with my legs and easily bounced away from the face. I discovered that I could move across the rock face in giant bounds, like an astronaut on the moon. Suspended from the rope, I gained an experiential understanding of the concept of trust. To believe in the rope with my body, I had to experience the rope’s strength with my body. The kinesthetic experiences I had climbing gave me the beginnings of the vocabulary I would use to make art.

I had majored in art as an undergraduate, but after college I attended seminary, believing that full-time ministry was the only appropriate path for a serious Christian like myself—and that art wasn’t spiritually acceptable. Ironically, it took going to seminary to show me I was wrong. I had intended to prepare myself for ministry but instead found myself being turned back toward a vocation in art. The summer after leaving seminary I studied under the Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker for three weeks at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. A pivotal figure in late twentieth-century Reformed circles, Rookmaaker opened my eyes to a conversation I didn’t know existed. “Christ didn’t come to make us Christians,” Rookmaaker told me. “He came to make us fully human.”

Later, in art school, feeling out of step both with my peers and with other Christians, I would cling to this idea. In theory, artists who are Christians should of all people be the most free to explore, question, push, and pursue, but I found it difficult to engage serious issues from a Christian standpoint without being preachy, naïve, or trite. I knew I believed in an unseen reality, but I had no idea how I could paint that. The terrain for my development—the L.A. art world of the mid-seventies—was reductivist in approach. Innovation was king: conceptual art was making a huge impact, abstraction and the beginnings of deconstructionism dominated the scene. Form itself was considered the primary valid subject matter, and narrative was looked down upon.

I entered grad school as a painter and simply came to a dead end when it came to content. (It’s a wonder I was accepted in the first place, since all my works were narrative.) The activity of putting paint on a surface and deriving meaning from the resulting form had become hollow to me. I simply didn’t know what to paint. Did subject matter, married to form, arrive at meaning, or was form more important than subject matter? When simplification was the norm, I wanted complexity. Where permanence prevailed, I was attracted to the temporary.

The contradictions paralyzed me. I couldn’t make art I didn’t value, so I stopped making anything at all. I didn’t understand then about trusting my intuition. I needed to “know” before I could do anything, and I believed words and concepts would lead to my salvation. So I read: art history, theory, biographies, current art magazines—everything I could get my hands on.

What I know now is that most of us artists don’t know what we’re doing. We think we do. We see ourselves as producing pieces with meaning—but it’s a meaning based on constructs of our own private creation. We can’t fully understand the implications of what we make, because it’s the viewer who takes in the information, processes it, and gives it meaning. Art is collaboration between the artist and the viewer. Art has significance as far as it is an act of communication, and history supports the notion that time is a factor in recognizing significance. Artists can talk a little about their ideas, their processes, their decisions, and their perceived results, but ultimately it’s the viewers who do the real connecting with the work.

While I was experiencing this crisis of content, a wise mentor pointed out that I needed to continue to make work or I would dig myself into an intellectual hole and get stuck there. Too inexperienced then to know that even this activity might have profound implications, I gave myself permission to make meaningless formalist work. A sculpture professor challenged me to make a piece without using traditional art materials. I figured that with my construction background, I could build something to be walked on. I simply made a ramp. It was eight feet long and rose to a three-foot height, was three feet wide at the bottom and only nine inches wide at the top. The walking surface was made of two-inch slats with one and a half inch gaps between them, and supported by a truss system of three-quarter-inch pine, cross-braced and tensioned with wires. The thing looked flimsy, and I could pick it up with one hand and wave it in the air. As soon as I finished the structure, I walked up the ramp for the first time. At the bottom I knew that I was secure, but as I got close to the top, I felt unstable. I could see the floor between the slats, three feet below. My muscles tensed, and my pulse became a little elevated. I knew then that I was on to something. I could feel danger, risk, and security, all at different points in the same piece, and I was getting information not just from my eyes, but from my body—just like on the rock face in British Columbia. The structure led to a metaphor that was not primarily visual, but experiential.

I had found the idea on which all my work has since been based: a person does not look at a piece of art and derive meaning from what he sees only. In particular, what a work causes the viewer to do is essential to the viewer’s experience of the piece. Sound, touch, balance, the sense of the body’s position in space, the sense of motion, the body’s memory for sequences and patterns—these elements combine in the viewer’s mind to form a whole. The idea of experiential metaphor, central to all my work, had its roots in climbing.

In graduate school, my paintings bored me because they didn’t do anything. I want viewers actively to discover for themselves—to listen, to walk, to feel their bodies, make adjustments, and to consider what they are doing. I want to create work that engages viewers and invites them to become participants, so that they themselves are the ones to unlock, reveal, and affirm. One way to start changing a passive viewer to an active participant in a work of art is to engage more than one of the senses at a time.

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock,” said Jesus. “Follow me,” he said to Peter—asking for a motion of the will, followed by an action. Be “doers of the word,” wrote James. “Preach the Gospel, and use words if you have to,” wrote Saint Francis. An ancient Chinese proverb goes, “I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.” Dr. William Glasser’s research supports the importance of sensation and interaction in memory retention. He writes that we learn only ten percent of what we read, twenty percent of what we hear, thirty percent of what we see, fifty percent of what we both see and hear, and eighty percent of what we experience personally.

I gave up painting and decided to become an artist instead of a painter or sculptor. Painters and sculptors make work for the eye only, but an artist can use anything as material, and make work that involves all the senses. I took my favorite paintbrush—one that had been my father’s, who died when I was a senior in high school—made a casket for it, and put the whole thing in a Plexiglas box. I called it Farewell to an Old Friend.

Around that time I supported myself by working as a carpenter’s apprentice. After work one day I happened to drive past a construction site and see a row of freshly framed houses without the plywood sheathing. You could see right through to the skeletons of the homes, and I remember thinking how beautiful they looked. Normally when I look at a house, I know what the inside structure is, but I can’t see it. But here, suddenly, all was revealed. I knew this was a clue to what I’d been experimenting with in my work. In creating multi-sensory experiences, I was struggling to represent a reality that couldn’t be seen with the eyes. I wanted my work to reveal a hidden structure.

After five years, in the early eighties, more and more of the artists around me were beginning to return to figurative work. I felt as if we had all been wandering in the same conceptual forest together, and suddenly the others were returning the way we had come, and I was left by myself on a narrow path hugging a cliff. I thought then (and still think) that my job as a Christian and an artist is to contribute to our knowledge of truth, and I can only offer an authentic contribution if I understand the systems of the world and how to operate within them—contemporary art movements included. I remembered what Rookmaaker said about our becoming fully human, and I kept going in the same direction. Ironically, in moving away from figuration, I had come to make work that was intimately concerned with the human body—not its appearance, but its responses.

The Los Angeles artist Michael Brewster modeled the integration of science and art for me. In the late seventies, his acoustic sculptures using standing sound waves were receiving significant exposure and gaining credibility. His pieces taught me about the perceptual apparatus of humans. I saw Robert Irwin’s “Scrim” installations and heard him lecture. I met Hap Tivey and James Turrell, who was then creating perceptual apertures in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, and I volunteered to work on their installations. Mowry Baden, who in my mind is the father of kinesthetic perceptual work, came to my studio and saw some of my pieces. His affirmation gave me hope.

I spent several years building structures to be walked on, teaching myself a new vocabulary. At first, my pieces tended to be linear and sequential. Soon however, I discovered that with round walking surfaces, the participant never came to an end, only decision points. I continued to read and learn about kinesthetic perception, the interaction between the senses, brain, and muscles, and the apparatus that allows us to remain upright in space, as well as sensory deprivation as a means of controlling perceptual experiences.

Tight Hill Corner, a piece from that period, was a wedge-like disc four feet in diameter with a central pivot point. I later applied the same principle in a larger scale piece called Parable. This was a plywood circle over six feet diameter, with a four by four by six-foot chamber underneath, containing sixty pounds of shot puts. The entire structure was elevated via a central pivot point, and when a participant stepped onto the surface of the disc, it rocked. For every movement the participant made, there was a counter-movement as the shot puts rolled around inside the chamber. Parable was my first conscious attempt to combine biblical content with an activity induced by a structure. I was thinking of the passage in Matthew that says that in the end times, there will be an increase in earthquakes. This piece appeared in a gallery show called Earthquakes, and the show was filmed as part of an NBC television special. I watched several local news anchors interact with the piece between shots. Their responses went beyond reacting and adjusting to the unsteady surface; they eventually achieved a mastery of the thing and simply began to play with it.

My work with disks in the mid-seventies led to Off-Centered Consequences [see Plate 5], another structure that dealt with spiritual content. This consisted of a doughnut-shaped platform eight feet in diameter and elevated by a machined aluminum post that functioned as a pivot point, so that the platform would tilt and roll as it was walked on. The post was visible to the participant at all times, and was deliberately set off-center by six inches. Circumnavigating this 250-pound piece, the participant would feel resistance until he passed the invisible center of gravity. The weight of the piece would then shift, and the participant would have to react instantly to maintain balance. The idea for the piece came partly from invisible experiences of my own: when I am spiritually off balance, I feel it. On some fronts I feel resistance, on others, a loss of control. One person told me walking on the piece felt like crossing the deck of a rocking ship.

For a show called Self-Elevation Systems, I created four structures dealing with pride. One piece, Show-Off, consisted of a vertical eleven-foot steel pole with a big steel bicycle seat at the top. Twenty inches below the seat was a footrest, from which a knotted rope hung to the ground. The whole thing was supported by four horizontal legs and stainless steel guy wires. I’d been teaching in the art department of the college where the show was held, and I knew some of the students. During the opening, a particularly outgoing, attention-loving student took the piece as a challenge, shinnied up the rope and got onto the seat. I knew the piece could support his weight, but hadn’t expected it to be climbed, and I worried he’d fall. However, I soon saw his act as a significant event: the abstract idea of the “show-off” had gone from word to physical interaction, and the piece went from being a symbolized concept to an embodied one.

In graduate school, when I was immersing myself in art history and theory, trying to save myself from creative implosion with ideas, I kept remembering the impact that C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia—the allegorical children’s stories—had had on me years before. Narrative and metaphor, I was sure, were powerful, and I wanted to figure out how to use them. As I developed and refined my kinesthetic vocabulary, I found that by combining several simple perceptual experiences in the same piece, I could create narrative situations. I started using structures to lead participants through a sequence of sensations: ramps for ascent and descent; curved walls for a change of direction; high, exposed places for insecurity and risk; private, enclosed spaces for security; low doorways for humbling oneself. I wanted to deal with Christian themes, but I still worried about seeming trite, naïve, or preachy. A narrative approach let me explore a concept like redemption in a piece like Out on a Limb, for example, in a way that allowed for complexity.

As I continued to research kinesthetics, I learned that each individual relies either on visual clues or on the inner ear to remain upright in space. Children develop an orientation toward one or the other before the age of ten. When I read this, I decided I wanted to create a site-specific sculpture for a gallery I knew a lot of children would visit.

Point of You [see Plate 7], a site-specific work for Seattle’s Pacific Arts Center in 1987, consisted of a series of passages and room-like spaces. The walls and floors were perfectly perpendicular to each other, so that once the participant stepped inside, all visual clues indicated that the structure was level, whereas in fact the entire thing was consistently tilted by four degrees. Upon entry, the viewer immediately had to deal with the sensation of slope. The visual and kinesthetic clues—the two types of information we use for balance—disagreed by four degrees. The eye had one opinion about which way was up; the inner ear had another. As viewers proceeded through the maze-like structure, which included triangular chambers and curved walls, the floor gradually sloped upward. At the end of the maze, having ascended one foot from the gallery floor, some viewers—those who as children had developed greater reliance on their eyes than their inner ears for balance—would become accustomed to the tilted space, their bodies accepting the visual clues. Others—those who relied more on the inner ear—would still feel that the walls were tilted, or that they weren’t seeing straight. The walk culminated with a triangular platform, the only level bit of floor in the entire structure. Here the participant, conditioned by walking through the twenty-one foot long structure, experienced a jolt. In order to adjust to the suddenly level floor, the body had to disengage from the cognitive brain.

In this piece I wanted to create a simple, direct, tangible experience of a theological truth: we face a day-to-day existence in a reality that is not the entire reality. I am conditioned by my surroundings to believe that what I see is how it is, but I can sometimes access a larger, unseen, spiritual reality. There I find wholeness, order, and peace. After walking through the tilted structure, at the moment of arriving at the level platform, they were forced to reorient themselves to a larger context—to the gallery room rather than the structure. They had no choice but to see a bigger world than the one they’d become accustomed to.

Sometimes I’d go to the gallery to watch people interact with Point of You. Often I’d ask them questions without telling them I was the artist. When I listened to people describe what they had just experienced, I found that many of them—including people without art backgrounds—were getting just what I’d hoped they’d get. One day I watched a class of kindergarteners moving through the piece, bouncing off the walls like pin-balls, squealing and laughing. I don’t think they got the theological implications, but they obviously enjoyed the sensation of running through the piece. Without being directed, they zeroed in on the one spot that was different. One of the parent chaperones, a pastor, told me that as he walked through the piece he felt himself adjust to the disorientation, then snap back when he came to the level spot. Another person described how she felt something was wrong, but couldn’t put her finger on what it was until she was able to look back.

When I was designing Point of You, an architect friend suggested I make a cardboard scale model, an idea that has permanently changed my working process. It’s difficult to visualize three-dimensional spaces and consider all of the angles using two-dimensional drawings, but a model allows me to consider a lot of information at once. Using photos, videos, and plans, I can get a sense of the site, and create a maquette that fits that environment. I’m currently working on several site-specific sculptures to be built in different parts of the country over the next six months, working from site images sent over the Internet.

In the late eighties and early nineties, I got to do more and more large, outdoor, site-specific installations. I used many of the same concepts—tilted floors, curved paths, decision points, destinations, specially arranged seats. I was refining and developing my architectural vocabulary, and as my vocabulary expanded, so did the scale. I found I could create perceptual experiences in a twenty by twenty-foot space that I couldn’t in a four-by-four foot space. It takes a good eighteen feet of walking for a participant’s responses to become conditioned; similarly, it takes a very big wall to occupy a participant’s visual field. I had experienced work by Barnett Newman, Jules Olitski, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler and Clyfford Still, all firsthand. Distance, peripheral vision, color, materials, and space were their principle tools, and I borrowed from the vocabulary they were creating. Now that I was building larger pieces, I had no choice but to recycle materials, for financial reasons as well as reasons of conscience.

Around this time, I started to become more open about my Christian beliefs. Richard Rohr writes, “Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart, so you can see what’s always happening right in front of you.” I wanted to create an experience that would make that truth physically felt. I began work on the maquette for Ears to Hear, Eyes to See during the Gulf War. One day my brother called me. He was in the Air National Guard, and they’d told him to call his family and say good-bye in case he was killed. I decided then that I wanted the piece to include a recognizable symbolic element, a casket, which would bear the weight of the entire structure. Our perception of a greater reality depends upon our dying to ourselves; only then do we begin to see and hear more clearly. The casket therefore would be foundational to all the participant’s experiences in this piece.

Ears to Hear, Eyes to See [see Plate 8] was built on a seventy-two-acre nature reserve outside of Dallas in 1991. From the primary entrance, the participant ascended a ramp to see a vista of the area. A curved wall collected the sounds of chirping birds from a stand of nearby trees, blocking out other noises and focusing the birdsong to a focal point, a seat. To reach this spot, the participant had to step across a twelve-inch gap between a ramp and the platform: a step of faith. This piece used much of the same vocabulary as the early pieces—ramps, curved walls, titled platforms—but here I intentionally began to develop a narrative, a sequence of crises and consequences. Each participant’s chain of decisions would create a story and reveal his or her affinities. Because the order of the participant’s experiences is central to any piece, I am still very deliberate in how I arrange the physical elements of my installations.

Early on, my working process was mainly idea-based, an act of the intellect. I knew before I started—or thought I should know—what a piece was going to mean. As I’ve progressed, I’ve come to rely more on faith; as I work with maquettes, exploring different possibilities, understanding the options and making decisions, a piece’s meaning is revealed to me. I no longer see my work as an act of logic, but one of trust.

Around the time I worked on Ears to Hear, Eyes to See, I’d been exploring the relationship between the individual and the community. In particular, I was interested in creating a work that dealt with the relationship between the individual and the church. Ship for Fools [see Plate 6] was to be constructed on site for the Greenbelt Festival in Northamptonshire, England, in 1993. The site blueprints had showed that the piece would stand near a small lake, which gave me the idea for a nautical metaphor. While I had an inner sense that my maquette was significant, it wasn’t until the piece was in process that I began to see why.

The piece is narrative-driven; as a participant moves through the structure, a story unfolds. Seen from the outside, Ship for Fools resembled part of the control center of an aircraft carrier. It centered on a twenty-foot tower with a second-story deck, which was semi-circular in shape, had a railing, and was supported by a round facade. Half of the facade was clad with sheeting material appearing like sheets of steel; the other half had only bare studs randomly crossed with horizontal strips of wood, as if the facade were still under construction. Though these haphazard strips made the structure look vulnerable and unfinished, in fact they lent it stability. I intended the finished section of the facade wall as a reference to the historical church, apparently intact, and the unfinished section to the contemporary church, still under construction. From the outside, this confused, land-locked structure appeared a “ship for fools.”

To enter, a participant had to find the low doorway between two of the studs, step up onto a cantilevered platform, and stoop. I had noticed a similar low doorway at the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Israel, which was originally built to keep looters from bringing their horses inside, and therefore required people to humble themselves before they could pass through, and I borrowed that element here. Inside was a quiet space, lit from above. The tower’s interior was red, and a piece of sheer fabric, dyed deep red, hung suspended from a chimney-like opening at the top. Looking up toward the light, participants would see the fabric, which rippled in the slightest breeze. I meant the red cloth to evoke both the movement of the Holy Spirit and the sacrifice that was paid. The strange, low door led to a quiet contemplative interior.

Participants would then move through a curved hallway. Faced with the round wall, a participant would turn around, a movement suggesting both repentance and sanctification. The semi-circular path ended in a decision point: one could step off the path or go up a stairway. Ascending, a participant might then join the others on the upper deck, where people would gather to view the surrounding landscape, or move away to other parts of the structure. As an individual moved through the piece, he or she would view the metaphoric church from the outside and inside, would be in solitude and community, would be hidden and exposed, humbled and elevated. Ship of Fools was not a piece that could be understood statically, or from a distance. By walking through the piece and making decisions, a participant created a narrative that explored the relationship of individual redemption to the church and community, and how redemption affects our perspective on the world.

Some pieces describe; others simply raise questions. As I’ve become more comfortable with intuition, my work has become less expositive and more interrogatory. Teleological Passages: Still a Small Voice [see Plate 9] was built in one of the Los Angeles Municipal Galleries at Barnsdall Park in North Hollywood in 1994. The materials for the structure were recycled from Come, an exterior installation done earlier that same year.

I’ve learned over time that people like to discover pieces for themselves. Therefore I’ve learned to put some of the more interesting elements furthest away from the entry points. The round wall in Teleological Passages was one such element. Its concave side was brilliant green, but the wall remained unfinished, its infrastructure of studs visible from the outside. Leading into the curve of the wall was a concrete sidewalk, which began a slow ascent, ending abruptly against the wall. I had used curved walls before to get participants to enact repentance by turning, but this curve worked differently. It was simultaneously a destination and beginning point. Confronted with the wall, the participant could hop off of the dead-end sidewalk, walk around it to the other side where the ramp/platform continued, hop back on, and keep ascending. The participant would then come to another platform, sloped gently in a different direction and facing a large, concave, black wall painted with clusters of stars. On one side of the platform stood a curved yellow pillar, on the other, a steel, cage-like booth. Above this space, supported by a steel truss attached to the booth, hung a steel frame overstretched with natural muslin. The shape, reminiscent of an airplane wing, reached back and cantilevered over the top of green wall. The black wall occupied most of the viewer’s visual field, and together with the tilted platform caused a sense of disorientation.

With this piece I wanted to connect structures in a way that went beyond linear thinking to simultaneous thinking. Simultaneous thinking is like a book in which a writer weaves a number of sub-plots together: initially the elements seem separate, but finally a larger whole is revealed. As we progress, our understanding of the whole changes. But unlike a book, an installation is at once linear and non-linear; a participant can walk through an installation, but can also look back and see all the elements at once. The juxtaposed elements of Teleological Passages—the static structures and participant’s process, the concrete point of origin and the curved field of infinity, a sense of disorientation and the sense of a hovering presence—come out of my Christian beliefs, but there’s no specific narrative here. By combining these elements, I wanted to make a piece that would ask a question of the viewer, one I don’t know how to ask in words. We are all sometimes conscious of the reality that lies beyond our senses. I wanted to choose elements whose associations would get participants to dwell on that consciousness—with their minds and bodies.

With Inside Outsiders, built in 2000 at Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota, I placed a particular emphasis on materials. Entering the gallery, a participant would first encounter a single chair with a translucent, fourteen-foot seatback. A smooth, arching frame, overstretched with bridal veil fabric, rose from the top of the chair, forming a canopy over most of the thirty-foot installation. The chair faced a doorway in a translucent, polyurethane wall. I meant the seat as an allusion to the moment of contemplation that precedes a decision to enter in—either to a physical or spiritual space. Passing inside, the participant would encounter a curved, white wall, tilted drastically backward, and would have to pause, then turn—an enactment of contemplation and repentance, as in Ship for Fools. Turning from the curved wall, the participant faced a space bounded by a tall, solid wall covered with clothing patterns—an allusion to the idea of intentional design. Finding no other door, the participant would return to the entrance and move either right or left to discover other aspects of the piece. One opening led into a triangular space walled by rigid frames overstretched with translucent polyurethane and bridal veil fabric. Further inside, adjacent to the solid, clothing patterned wall, was a seat similar in size and shape to the one at the entrance, covered in the same patterns as the wall [see Plate 11]. As the seats are similar, the act of contemplation is the same inside or outside, though the context differs. Someone standing outside the structure would see the outline of a person in the inner chair, but not the person’s features [see Plate 10]. Only from the inside would the person’s face be fully revealed. I meant for the piece to create a sense that a thing can be revealed but still not perfectly clear.

The idea of revelation—partial and total—of an unseen world is central to what I want my work to do. I have sometimes encountered—and continue to encounter—a world fuller than the one I see every day. By doing my work—trusting the process even when there’s no apparent logic to it, waiting for meaning to be revealed, and sometimes lowering myself horizontally into thin air—I can understand that fuller world more and more.

Visit Roger Feldman as Image Artist of the Month for November '01

Issue #30 • Spring 2001