Babel 2008
exhibition installation- Insitu/Fabienne LeClerc, Paris , FR
Photo: marc dommage
.......As described in Genesis………… the Tower of Babel was designed to ‘reach the heavens’ as a way to represent the power of man’s ’godliness’. Angered by this act of irreverence, god confused the languages of the people and scattered them to different parts of the world. Their inability to communicate prevented the completion of the Tower and maintained their separateness.
In English the word ”babble” means “irrelevant chatter”.
The two projects speak to the complexity of our world, its confusion, mis-communication and disruption. In both sculptures I have used the innate characteristics of various life forms (i.e. birds & lizards) as human surrogates to create psycho-social interactions mediated through the architectural form of the objects.
Babel is a love seat, mimicking the form of the Tower. The space delegated for the ‘other’ is substituted with a cage of 20 song canaries, filling the Tower with chatter. In contrast, in bed with a cold-blooded animal…etc is a 2-part daybed where the occupant shares a space with a cold, silent, passive companion (lizard).
The Landscape drawings depict a world being constructed and de-constructed simultaneously. They refer to the moment of transition when the structural component of architecture is taken over by the expressionism of nature. The abstraction caused by this process is ironically created by the computer, a tool generally used for construction. In lieu of presenting this action in a pictorial space, the viewer is positioned in the miasma of spatial deconstruction.
