Artist Statement
The form of On the second day, Saturday, your three minutes... is attached to our familiar experiences of life: cycles, relationships, rituals, dialogues, spaces, events...it's founded upon our perceptions of everyday situations. This performance/installation connects time with our everyday relationships to space, events, people, and rituals, and seeks to break through the temporal aspects usually involved in performance and art viewing. Time, then, becomes a clue about the performance/space, a suggestive reminder. In the midst of all these regularities that surround us, the work serves to magnify, even to transform, certain minuscule and easily overlooked interstices, to magnify the rituals so readily neglected in our lives, to urge the viewer toward a reflection on the details of everyday life. Once we depart from our familiar modes and take notice of the reminders from beyond these everyday regularities, could we propose questions amidst the regularities after we have returned to reality?
On the second day
The room has two entries, mirror images of each other, and the viewer who enters faces a semi-transparent mirror, like the projection screen in a movie theater. The semi-transparent mirror divides the room into two halves, and in front of the mirror is a row of chairs. The arrangements in the two halves of the room are exactly alike, creating the illusion of a semi-transparent, mirror-image space. By controlling the lighting in the two halves of the room, viewers entering from another door (the opposite entry point) will see in front of the mirror their own image, as well as the images, directly facing them, of people who have entered from the other doorway (the partial reflection of the mirror means that viewers in the other half of the room appear as semi-transparent images). The viewer sitting in one of the chairs will find their image overlapping with the image of another viewer sitting in a chair opposite them; the experience will be like watching a movie, but what they are watching is the superposition, and the opposition, of themselves with the viewer opposite them.
Saturday
The space within is divided into two; the viewer faces an actor (dressed as a museum attendant or volunteer) sitting half visible behind a half-acrylic, half-wood wall. The actor rings a service bell on the table before the viewer reaches her, and from behind the glass passes the viewer a ticket of “ Saturday” that records their time of arrival written backwards. Unable to see "what the work actually is," the fact that the viewer learns about the work through the ticket adds to the sense that the work is an "event," and that this conversation becomes the actual form in which the work is experienced.
Your three minutes
Behind the door is an extremely shallow space with a bar, separated from the viewer by a pane of frosted glass. Behind the frosted glass viewers can dimly make out a cabinet, with drinks of different colors, and a bartender. There are two seats in front of the bar, but separated by a corrugated panel. The bar seats two guests at a time, and each can obtain a drink through an opening between the countertop and the glass. The encounters we have, sitting at a bar with our good friends/strangers/bartenders, are familiar and intimate real-life scenarios, but in this particular space, everyone finds themselves in a state of separation.