DON'T LET THEM KID YOU THE MONEY IS THERE
† Installation/Performance at Artist Space, NYC 2006
Performers: Christopher Kline, Chris Keating, Shon Mahoney, Shawn Creeden, Paige Johnston
Costumes: Stacy Scibelli
Midi-trigger/two-way mirror pyramid lights: Ben Phelan
Wallpaper: Caitlin Mociun
Sound:
A curtain gathering, a certain unsettledness and delicate unraveling, the sounds are reverberations from the ephemeral, the Northern coast, the river valley wetlands, the rattling from every corner. We have said: The opening up of the earth and the spewing forth of one million dead bells, settling ash, the fast-motion regrowth of the underbrush, the ghosts of slash and burn.
There are, of course, daring escapes: a complex web of kid-built dirt-tunnels, orphanage arson, snakes hidden in the grass of defensible space. In this way, we threaten a glacial violence; conversely, at times a swift sword-style, sparking the wick. And so, hand-to-mouth, we thrive on a darkling plain dotted with dying bastions of lightness and revel in the sentimentality of terror, the quiet time beside a morning, the authenticity of the pillage, the design of new hexes. This is our hermetic tradition: spinning weathervanes of wet-woods ballads.
For all of this fanfare (metaphor and imagery), our vagueness is not theoretical nor is it evasive. It is a nuanced secret sent through the mail, the hiss and hum of an old cassette recorded over itself again and again. It is a processional, the dissemination of sleight-of-hand tricks by way of a steady plowing-through. Much has already been said of authors and gods, of production and project-basedness, but what lies at the heart of us is not vernacular, evidence, or movement. Ideology and methodology are unsustainable so there can be no manifesto or ground rules, only a spare declaration: We shall be relentless.
Above all, we are named by a drawing. It is made by two recontextualized lines: a vertical crossed one third from the bottom by a shorter horizontal.
