Anteroom: A Site Sensitive Performance Installation (2005)
By Mark Jeffery, Judith Leemann and Judd Morrissey
“The Americans are not afraid of their heads though very much afraid of their legs; if you cover these, they will fight forever”
Anteroom captures a series of performative visual and textual memorials, as if portraits, depicting discrete, extended moments of waiting, arrival, and fragmentation. Symbolic displacements attempt to bear witness to the body made multiple or rendered partial (the sawing of books and houses as if soldiers and limbs, the story of the boy shattered by his own antlers). An examination of the poetics and politics of division, the work considers schematic conventions for describing the relative morphology of the human body: the sagittal, transverse and coronal planes are used to perform divisions on architectural space, to organize kinds of sight, and to create three-dimensional inquiries in a physical and virtual environment. The GAR Annex will be traversed by a reversible cloth (each side printed upon with a different panoramic scene) with two star-shaped holes stitched in blue and gold, into which three figures will embed themselves in an ongoing rotation and enact a specific task. The large arched window in the anteroom that is itself divided, as though head from body, by a dropped ceiling, will be illuminated by live and recorded activity that can be viewed both within the anteroom and from the outside on Michigan Avenue.
Special thanks to the Illinois Arts Council and the Catwalk Catskill NY Residency Programme of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Site Unseen 2005 Pamphlet
Site Unseen 2005 Postcard
Site Unseen 2005 Postcard
Anteroom paper house
Anteroom paper house
Anteroom- roll over images to view ephemera
© Mark Jeffery 1994 - 2011