Artists: Principal investigator Marguerite Perret in collaboration with Bruce Scherting, Robin Lasser and Stephanie Lanter.
Waiting is part of the human condition.
Common and ubiquitous, the experience of waiting is elastic and fluid, with a full spectrum of temperamental frequencies, emotional volumes, and spatial-perceptual dimensions. As mundane as long supermarket checkout lines, exasperating traffic jams, and internet downloads; as anxiously desperate as hospital waiting rooms during a medical emergency; as giddy as anticipating a job offer or romantic meeting, and as mysteriously sublime as expecting a new baby–the effects of these liminal, interim periods range as much as the situation. The Geography of Waiting–one of the Waiting Room Projects, a series of collaborations begun in 2009–utilizes various media to explore and map out some of the abstract, physical and psychological dynamics of waiting. With content collected and developed from contributions made by individuals internationally (both non-artist and artist), the installation presents a cross-sensory, concentrated evocation of this liminal mode of being. |
Personal narratives, archetypal objects, and photographs of places have been shared, gathered, recorded, interpreted, measured, cataloged, and composed. The resulting images, video, sound, text, sculpture, website, and interactive social media culminate here in a waiting-room-like space. Waiting is a constellation of time, location, circumstance, and personal agency (or power). The distance between the internal synthesis of these elements and external societal systems can often mean the difference between stress and peace. In this crossing over of actual and imagined boundaries, many voices are connected, and a new landscape of waiting emerges. Inhabited by community, rather than isolated individuals, members can navigate with enhanced–and hopefully empowered–perspective. |
Waiting on the sea
Video stills: 20-minute single channel video and sound loop |
Pulsing ocean sounds, blood pounding through veins, and the ringing bells of economic panic are layered over twelve languages of “what people are waiting for” in this video
and sound projection. Whether fading into larger cycles of energy, being jarred by reality, or “riding the waves,” we wait. |
Waiting is everywhere
Dye-sublimation fabric prints |
The imagined journeys of an iconic but typical mauve, vinyl waiting-room chair
are traced in these large photographic images. This personified chair encounters a series of unlikely yet somehow completely reasonable settings–teetering on a dock at the edge of a lake, in a parking garage, in a greenhouse–all places our subconscious may visit or become stuck, as we wait. The contours of these landscapes blur into shadows superimposed on large-scale maps, evoking artificial boundaries, architecture, or the ambiguous shapes of a surrealist dream. |