CINDERBOX
Cinderbox was a site-specific installation in the Central Utah Art Center’s (CUAC) CCA cabin space, created in collaboration with Mary Toscano. Like our other collaborative exhibition, Into The White, Cinderbox explored the canon of white walls; in this case pushing it closer to an extreme. Creating a vague narrative with white-on-white wall paintings and drawings, at first glance the cabin appeared empty. A catastrophic event, implied by billows of smoke, drove barely visible animals across the cabin walls, rushing in a mass exodus out to the courtyard to meet a different fate. Once they penetrated the outer walls, they left the ghostly 2-dimensional space and became 3-dimensional objects that were a stark and strange contrast to the historic-pioneer surroundings. Mary created a mass of starlings, and a pack of rats (we collaborated on the dipped rats for the exterior), and I created oversized versions of my lonely, figurative Victorian furniture sets, and the exterior bear sculpture. The installation process was webstreamed live during our week-long residency, and since we were using white paint on white walls, it appeared as though we were painting nothing.