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I want to start with a question.
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Where does an art work 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 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
a kind of wonder,
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but also a kind of futility
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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 start with,
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to put all the paint 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 esthetic.
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So things like toothpicks, [unclear],
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pieces of toilet paper,
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to see if in the way that I put my energy,
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my hand, my time into them,
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that the behavior could actually create
a kind of value it 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,
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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 a notepad paper
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and had it actually project on it.
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Then I did this experiment
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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, it's 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 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 I 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're 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 it effectively made
the interior of a planetarium,
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without even realizing that.
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And I remember that as a child,
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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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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 audience
around 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
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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
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[unclear] across the 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
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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 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 out 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 print making?
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How can an installation
use the camera's lens
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to frame a landscape?
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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?
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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 become a habitat
for the nature around it.
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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 the 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)
HUY QUANG TRAN
Hi,
Should we update:
4:35 -4:40: And they were done
through studies of animals,
by:
4:35 -4:40: And they were done through
experimentation with these studies of animals,
Thanks