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I want to start with a question.

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Where does an artwork begin?

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Now sometimes that question is absurd.

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It can seem deceptively simple,

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as it was when I asked the question
with this piece, "Portable Planetarium,"

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that I made in 2010.

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I asked the question:

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"What would it look like
to build a planetarium of one's own?"

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I know you all ask that every morning,

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but I asked myself that question.

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And as an artist,

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I was thinking about our effort,

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our desire, our continual longing
that we've had over the years

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to make meaning of the world around us

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through materials.

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And for me, to try and find
the kind of wonder,

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but also a kind of futility
that lies in that very fragile pursuit,

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is part of my art work.

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So I bring together
the materials I find around me,

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I gather them to try
and create experiences,

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immersive experiences that occupy rooms,

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that occupy walls, landscapes, buildings.

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But ultimately,
I want them to occupy memory.

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And after I've made a work,

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I find that there's usually one memory
of that work that burns in my head.

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And this is the memory for me --

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it was this sudden
kind of surprising experience

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of being immersed inside that work of art.

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And it stayed with me
and kind of reoccurred in my work

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about 10 years later.

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But I want to go back
to my graduate school studio.

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I think it's interesting, sometimes,
when you start a body of work,

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you need to just completely
wipe the plate clean,

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take everything away.

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And this may not look
like wiping the plate clean,

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but for me, it was.

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Because I had studied painting
for about 10 years,

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and when I went to graduate school,

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I realized that I had developed skill,
but I didn't have a subject.

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It was like an athletic skill,

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because I could paint the figure quickly,

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but I didn't know why.

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I could paint it well,
but it didn't have content.

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And so I decided to put
all the paints aside for a while,

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and to ask this question, which was:

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"Why and how do objects
acquire value for us?"

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How does a shirt that I know
thousands of people wear,

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a shirt like this one,

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how does it somehow feel like it's mine?

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So I started with that experiment,

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I decided, by collecting materials
that had a certain quality to them.

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They were mass-produced,
easily accessible,

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completely designed
for the purpose of their use,

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not for their aesthetic.

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So things like toothpicks, thumbtacks,

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pieces of toilet paper,

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to see if in the way that I put my energy,
my hand, my time into them,

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that the behavior could actually create
a kind of value in the work itself.

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One of the other ideas is,
I wanted the work to become live.

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So I wanted to take it
off of the pedestal,

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not have a frame around it,

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have the experience not be
that you came to something

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and told you that it was important,

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but that you discover
that it was in your own time.

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So this is like a very,
very old idea in sculpture,

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which is: How do we breathe life
into inanimate materials?

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And so, I would go to a space like this,

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where there was a wall,

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and use the paint itself,

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pull the paint out off the wall,

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the wall paint into space
to create a sculpture.

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Because I was also interested in this idea

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that these terms, "sculpture,"
"painting," "installation" --

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none of these mattered in the way
we actually see the world.

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So I wanted to blur those boundaries,

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both between mediums
that artists talk about,

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but also blur the experience
of being in life and being in art,

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so that when you are in your everyday,

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or when you are in one of my works,

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and you saw, you recognized the everyday,

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you could then move that experience
into your own life,

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and perhaps see the art in everyday life.

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I was in graduate school in the '90s,

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and my studio just became
more and more filled with images,

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as did my life.

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And this confusion of images and objects

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was really part of the way
I was trying to make sense of materials.

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And also, I was interested
in how this might change

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the way that we actually experience time.

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If we're experiencing time
through materials,

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what happens when images and objects
become confused in space?

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So I started by doing some
of these experiments with images.

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And if you look back to the 1880s,

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that's when the first photographs
started turning into film.

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And they were done
through studies of animals,

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the movement of animals.

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So horses in the United States,
birds in France.

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They were these studies of movement

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that then slowly,
like zoetropes, became film.

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So I decided, I will take an animal

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and I'm going to play with that idea

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of how the image is not static
for us anymore, it's moving.

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It's moving in space.

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And so I chose
as my character the cheetah,

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because she is the fastest
land-dwelling creature on earth.

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And she holds that record,

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and I want to use her record

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to actually make it kind of
a measuring stick for time.

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And so this is what she looked like
in the sculpture

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as she moved through space.

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This kind of broken framing
of the image in space,

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because I had put up notepad paper

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and had it actually project on it.

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Then I did this experiment
where you have kind of a race,

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with these new tools and video
that I could play with.

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So the falcon moves out in front,

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the cheetah, she comes in second,

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and the rhino is trying
to catch up behind.

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Then another one of the experiments,

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I was thinking about how,

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if we try and remember
one thing that happened to us

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when we were, let's say, 10 years old.

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It's very hard to remember
even what happened in that year.

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And for me, I can think
of maybe one, maybe two,

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and that one moment
has expanded in my mind

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to fill that entire year.

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So we don't experience time
in minutes and seconds.

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So this is a still
of the video that I took,

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printed out on a piece of paper,

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the paper is torn and then the video
is projected on top of it.

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And I wanted to play with this idea

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of how, in this kind of
complete immersion of images

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that's enveloped us,

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how one image can actually grow

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and can haunt us.

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So I had all of these --

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these are three out of, like,
100 experiments I was trying with images

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for over about a decade,

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and never showing them,

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and I thought, OK, how do I bring this
out of the studio, into a public space,

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but retain this kind of energy
of experimentation

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that you see when you go
into a laboratory,

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you see when you go into a studio,

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and I had this show coming up
and I just said,

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alright, I'm going to put my desk
right in the middle of the room.

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So I brought my desk
and I put it in the room,

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and it actually worked
in this kind of very surprising way to me,

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in that it was this kind of flickering,
because of the video screens, from afar.

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And it had all
of the projectors on it,

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so the projectors were creating
the space around it,

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but you were drawn towards
the flickering like a flame.

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And then you were enveloped in the piece

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at the scale that we're all
very familiar with,

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which is the scale of being in front
of a desk or a sink or a table,

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and you are immersed, then,
back into this scale,

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this one-to-one scale
of the body in relation to the image.

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But on this surface,

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you had these projections on paper
being blown in the wind,

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so there was this confusion
of what was an image

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and what was an object.

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So this is what the work looked like
when it went into a larger room,

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and it wasn't until I made this piece

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that I realized that I'd effectively made
the interior of a planetarium,

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without even realizing that.

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And I remembered, as a child,
loving going to the planetarium.

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And back then, the planetarium,

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there was always not only
these amazing images on the ceiling,

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but you could see the projector itself
whizzing and burring,

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and this amazing camera
in the middle of the room.

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And it was that, along with seeing
the audience around you looking up,

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because there was an audience
in the round at that time,

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and seeing them, and experiencing,
being part of an audience.

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So this is an image from the web
that I downloaded

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of people who took images
of themselves in the work.

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And I like this image

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because you see how the figures
get mixed with the work.

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So you have the shadow of a visitor
against the projection,

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and you also see the projections
across a person's shirt.

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So there were these self-portraits
made in the work itself,

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and then posted,

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and it felt like a kind of cyclical
image-making process.

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And a kind of an end to that.

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But it reminded me and brought me back
to the planetarium,

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and that interior,

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and I started to go back to painting.

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And thinking about how a painting
is actually, for me,

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about the interior images
that we all have.

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There's so many interior images,

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and we've become so focused
on what's outside our eyes.

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And how do we store memory in our mind,

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how certain images emerge out of nowhere

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or can fall apart over time.

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And I started to call this series
the "Afterimage" series,

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which was a reference to this idea
that if we all close our eyes right now,

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you can see there's this flickering
light that lingers,

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and when we open it again,
it lingers again --

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this is happening all the time.

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And an afterimage is something
that a photograph can never replace,

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you never feel that in a photograph.

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So it really reminds you of the limits
of the camera's lens.

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So it was this idea of taking the images
that were outside of me --

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this is my studio --

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and then trying to figure out how
they were being represented inside me.

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So really quickly,

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I'm just going to whiz through
how a process might develop

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for the next piece.

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So it might start with a sketch,

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or an image that's burned in my memory

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from the 18th century --

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it's Piranesi's "Colosseum."

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Or a model the size of a basketball --

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I built this around a basketball,

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the scale's evidenced
by the red cup behind it.

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And that model can be put
into a larger piece as a seed,

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and that seed can grow
into a bigger piece.

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And that piece can fill
a very, very large space.

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But it can funnel down into a video
that's just made from my iPhone,

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of a puddle outside my studio
in a rainy night.

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So this is an afterimage
of the painting made in my memory,

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and even that painting can fade
as memory does.

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So this is the scale of a very small image

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from my sketchbook.

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You can see how it can explode

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to a subway station
that spans three blocks.

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And you could see how going
into the subway station

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is like a journey through
the pages of a sketchbook,

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and you can see sort of a diary of work
writ across a public space,

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and you're turning the pages
of 20 years of art work

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as you move through the subway.

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But even that sketch
actually has a different origin,

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it has an origin in a sculpture
that climbs a six-story building,

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and is scaled to a cat from the year 2002.

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I remember that because I had
two black cats at the time.

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And this is an image of a work from Japan

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that you can see
the afterimage of in the subway.

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Or a work in Venice,

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where you see the image
etched in the wall.

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Or how a sculpture
that I did at SFMOMA in 2001,

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and created this kind of dynamic line,

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how I stole that to create a dynamic line

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as you descend down
into the subway itself.

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And this merging of mediums
is really interesting to me.

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So how can you take a line
that pulls tension like a sculpture

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and put it into a print?

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Or then use line
like a drawing in a sculpture

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to create a dramatic perspective?

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Or how can a painting mimic
the process of printmaking?

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How can an installation
use the camera's lens

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to frame a landscape?

250
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How can a painting on string
become a moment in Denmark,

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in the middle of a trek?

252
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And how, on the High Line,
can you create a piece

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that camouflages itself
into the nature itself

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and becomes a habitat
for the nature around it?

255
00:12:28,729 --> 00:12:31,776
And I'll just end with two pieces
that I'm making now.

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This is a piece called "Fallen Sky"

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that's going to be a permanent
commission in Hudson Valley,

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and it's kind of the planetarium
finally come down

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and grounding itself in the earth.

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And this is a work from 2013
that's going to be reinstalled,

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have a new life in the reopening of MOMA.

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And it's a piece that the tool
itself is the sculpture.

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So the pendulum, as it swings,

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is used as a tool to create the piece.

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So each of the piles of objects

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go right up to one centimeter
to the tip of that pendulum.

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So you have this combination
of the lull of that beautiful swing,

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but also the tension that it constantly
could destroy the piece itself.

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And so, it doesn't really matter
where any of these pieces end up,

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because the real point for me

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is that they end up
in your memory over time,

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and they generate ideas beyond themselves.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)