The Americans are not afraid of their heads though very much afraid of their legs; if you cover these, they will fight forever

Anteroom (GAR Annex, Chicago Cultural Center) captures a series of performative visual and textual memorials, as if portraits, depicting discrete, extended moments of waiting, arrival, and fragmentation. Symbolic displacements attempt to bear witness to the body made multiple or rendered partial (the sawing of books and houses as if soldiers and limbs, the story of the boy shattered by his own antlers). An examination of the poetics and politics of division, the work considers schematic conventions for describing the relative morphology of the human body: the sagittal, transverse and coronal planes are used to perform divisions on architectural space, to organize kinds of sight, and to create three-dimensional inquiries in a physical and virtual environment. The GAR Annex will be traversed by a reversible cloth (each side printed upon with a different panoramic scene) with two star-shaped holes stitched in blue and gold, into which three figures will embed themselves in an ongoing rotation and enact a specific task. The large arched window in the anteroom that is itself divided, as though head from body, by a dropped ceiling, will be illuminated by live and recorded activity that can be viewed both within the anteroom and from the outside on Michigan Avenue.

This work was installed and performed with Mark Jeffery and Judith Leemann at the Chicago Cultural Center for the annual Site Unseen festival on November 16, 2005 from 6-9pm.