Average Chandeliers

Project description

Exhibition

With(out) With(in), San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries San Francisco, CA, 2019

Average Chandeliers is a series of algorithmically created photographs that reflect on the ephemerality and fragility of beauty.   The works are created from photos of chandeliers culled from lighting showrooms on the Internet.  Each image is comprised of multiple photos “averaged” by software into one image.

The chandelier can represents ostentatious wealth, kitsch and camp at the same time (think Liberace’s candelabras).  But it also represents delicacy, lightness and the tinkling presence of spirits.  Chandeliers are queer sculptures.  They appeal to the queerness of grandeur and the evanescent.  They float above like a bird with crystal plumage with feathers that chime.  The process of “averaging” in these photographic images creates a ghostly layered image…there and not there.  The eye wanders into the depth of the image trying to settle on one layer, but is always dragged into another.  They are like x-rays penetrating and revealing the inner structures and beauty of bodies. 

These image also reflect the probing of the HIV infected body.  The examination that reveals disease and death and the fragileness of life. This series is inspired by the transitory work of Félix González-Torres where glittery surfaces suggest the transmogrification of the queer soul.  They also came out of my love of the pseudo-scientific The Floral Stereoradiographs of Albert G. Richards at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City.  Delicate flowers were bombarded with x-rays and photographed in stereo to freeze the unseen inner structures and extreme hidden beauty.   The images are like seeing a flower’s soul.  The Average Chandeliers are both Science (algorithmic, x-rayed, anatomy) and the Art of what is not really there.