La Maison Tunisie (After Perriand),
2004, cardboard, paper, glue, and tape.
Click thumbnails to view larger images. |
Project Statements
La Maison Tunisie (After Perriand) is a resuscitation of a modernist
shelving unit by French designer Charlotte Perriand, a colleague
of Le Corbusier–but executed in cardboard, paper, glue, and tape.
Built using the same conceptual strategy as one would build a
shanty (with whatever’s at hand ),
I’ve tried to pull together the history of style, place, and social space, and
to implicate the
layers of translations at work on both the “original” and the “cover.” My memories
of the Philippines include crumbling architecture in the International Style,
of which Perriand was a
student. Indeed, that style went international– to the Third World–and aged into
a dated design physically manifesting the weight of reality and time (even humanity)
coming to bear on the modernist vision of progress.
Untitled (After Perriand) is made entirely from
papier-maché; with the weight on top pulling downwards like the weight of history.
Black Market uses altered tourist photos of the Philippines
downloaded from the internet, as well as sculptural reconfigurations
of commodities. I digitally “blacked out” commodities
from marketplace images—mainly the produce, foodstuffs,
and other commonly traded items in villages. In thinking on the
global control of goods and capital exercised by multi-national
corporations, I began to speculate that the term “black
market” could not only come to refer to knock-off or imitation
goods, but to any item being sold or produced which falls
outside of the “sanctioned” channels of capitalism. The term
itself conjures up images of contraband weapons, drugs, illegal
merchandise, human trafficking, and shady backroom deals. What
if produce and local handicrafts were seen to be just as dangerous?
"Body Double" consists of silent sequences of a
tropical landscape that fade in and out, interspersed with a completely black
screen.
Scenes of sky, mountains, foliage, and rivers are "cropped" in squares and rectangles.
I used the
movie "Platoon" and edited out all the scenes of battle and dialogue, cropping
the frame to
focus on the peripheral landscapes in an
attempt to "search for the Philippines." The overwhelming majority of Hollywood
Vietnam
War movies are filmed in the Philippines, and as
a "body double" for Vietnam, the Philippines occupies a strange place in the
imagination of
the American public–a physically "insignificant" place and also a completely
familiar place via
its substitution for Vietnam.
“Body Double”, 2005, film still
|
