“I decided to give myself two years to complete this installation of the things that could easily be included in what was collected from a long voyage to someplace else in some other time.”
This is an exhibition of what is acquired during a time of exploration. Explorers travel to places hitherto unknown with the sole purpose of documenting what they have discovered. They navigate their way to and through a place that is completely foreign and unknown. And then bring as much of the experience as possible home to be recorded and preserved. All the evidence of a place’s very existence is predicated on what the explorer chooses to bring back and put before us. And if all notations are either lost or in a language we are unfamiliar with, we are left to make our own assumptions as to what it is we are looking at.
I decided to give myself two years to complete this installation of the things that could easily be included in what was collected from a long voyage to someplace else in some other time. They are the desiccated remains of botanical plants and animals, vials of specimens collected and perhaps catalogued, maps, tools, a shipboard game not unlike chess or checkers, and the survivors’ own attempt to document their memories of the trip by way of assembled dioramas. There are only hints at the languages spoken between the explorers and those native to this place. As viewers we are totally free to be the explorer, the collector and the interpreter.
