“Now the truth of the matter - and one has no eye for that in times of great peril, and only by a great effort even in times when danger is threatening - is that in reality the burrow does provide a considerable degree of security, but by no means enough, for is one ever free from the anxieties inside it?”
- Franz Kafka, The Burrow
My installation The Burrow (H.H.) will be on from 14 January - 9 February at Open Source Gallery, located in Brooklyn. Working from photographs I took of an inhabited self-storage unit in New Mexico and using materials found in the surrounding neighborhood, The Burrow (H.H.) repurposes the gallery as a transitional living space, in which everyday artifacts of human existence take on different meaning when encountered in a place not designed for habitation. In constructing The Burrow (H.H.) specifically for the gallery, I want to engage my ongoing interest in creating projects in relation to the opportunities and constraints presented by the sites in which they are located.
The title of the project is
taken from The Burrow, a Kafka story told from the perspective of a compulsive character who
describes with pride the concealed burrow he has built to protect himself. As the character elaborates on the
details, however, the description grows more paranoid and fantastical, and
ultimately the narrator becomes trapped, possessed by his own creation. My project aims to similarly create a
state of curiosity and uneasiness, in which viewers are invited–through the
objects presented–to reconstruct for themselves the life lived by the person
who is not there. But by
restricting physical access to the space, the project relegates viewers to be
voyeurs, from the outside, prompting them to consider their own relationship to
the imagined life inside.
