Suitcases

Journeys is the title of a section of the exhibit that takes us in a somewhat different direction.  Not entirely different, however, as a dialectic of inner and outer spaces is still at work.  Beginning by making a rubber mold of a small old fashioned suitcase, the artist uses the mold to make a replica in white resin.  We then find variations on a theme: a “Ship in a Bottle” within a suitcase, for example, or a valise overstuffed with white shirts, as if forcing their way from inside into the light. Although the band saw is put to use here in only piece, the theme of the suitcase itself points back to the wall sculptures as its very structure highlights the exposure or revelation of something within—opening, closing, hiding, uncovering. “Something” is an open suitcase with only an open book inside, while “Nothing” is an empty suitcase riddled with holes. A suitcase labeled “Everything,” apparently under pressure from its expansive contents, stretches surrealistically beyond the breaking point. “Fear and Trembling” relies again on the band saw, as this white suitcase has been neatly cut, along with its contents, into six uniform slices like so many pieces of Wonder Bread.  We encounter an object meant to enclose and contain now exposed and laid bare as a row of cross sections.

The journey here is not hard to read in relation to themes of fall from innocence to experience and life passages that characterize much of the rest of the show.  Yet on a more materially intimate level what we find with these suitcases is not merely a metonymic connection to journeys to be taken once the case is in hand, but the problem of interior and exterior repeated in each case.  In other words this is a journey outward and inward, enacted with the materiality of the suitcase itself: too little in the inside, hollowed out, literally riddled with holes, sliced into strips in order to reveal the inner truth, or the suitcase that should be inside the ship paradoxically containing the thing that should convey it.  The variation on the theme of what is inside and outside the suitcase reorients its symbolic force away from the grand voyage to the ones we take everyday, perhaps without ever leaving our own living rooms.