With Flying Colors

What is at the crossroads, the empty traffic light street, is a situation, an anticipation, a moment in time. The structure around it is waiting for it, a traffic light might still blink in the misty night, mechanically doing its job, but ultimately it is a space waiting for something to happen. A man crosses the zebra crossing, a single car roves through, the sound of commotion pierces the silent trance. This quiet space of potential, the space for animation, this mundane technical assemblage of everyday life, which occupies the interstitial spaces of reality, in betwixt and between, silently watched by these guardians, which cast their gaze in red, green or orange, is filled with quiet rest, and desolate with absence. A space for something to appear, an event to pass. This waiting which is already a moment, a celebratory event, an ecstatic void.

With Flying Colors is a series of sculptures that take the traffic light as a familiar symbol of order, orientation and control, and place it in an unfamiliar register. Constructed from ash, epoxy and programmable LEDs, the sculptures retain the visual authority of infrastructure while becoming strangely excessive, tactile and ambiguous. The traffic light becomes a univocal symbol in drag: still signaling, but no longer simply telling us what to do.

The work began with a fascination for the strange intimacy between the human and the technological. The systems and objects that organize our movement through the world are not simply external to us; they participate in the worlds we inhabit and, in doing so, participate in what we understand as human. The familiar object becomes strange as the familiar self does too. What appears to be a boundary between subject and environment becomes porous.

The sculptures occupy this between: between function and spectacle, guidance and uncertainty, object and environment, human and technological. They are signaling objects that no longer resolve the situation they mark. Instead, they open a space in which mobility, relation and meaning become unsettled.

The And of the World (Exhibition page)

Materials:

Wood (ash), cast epoxy, controllable LED strings, JST connectors, UTP cables, digital vector images on CNC milled polystyrene