Burn Pile began as a roving interactive art installation, functioning both as a truth/sincerity harvesting unit, and as a display and broadcast venue, aspiring to link people in a community of heart-felt incoherence.
Truth donors were invited to speak inside a private booth. Their statements were immediately scrambled with prior utterances from previous donors, thereby losing any obvious or accurate meaning. Donors then chose whether or not to release these garbled statements to be variously commemorated by me. I offered this interactive booth at various locations, such as shopping malls, thrift stores, flea markets and public parks.
By carefully making objects to commemorate these garbled readings of peoples’ innermost expressions, I aspire to show respect for an ambient sincerity freed of specificity. Does a greater truth—obscure, indefinable—arise from this? Does my own personal labor in embellishing these scrambled utterances by itself enhance them with meaning? I feel these questions have particular relevance for our current moment of truth prodding.
An ongoing and unifying element throughout the project has been the use of patterning suggestive of woodgrain, which I consider a stand-in for a notion of “flow”. I think of people donating their truth or sincerity into a communal gibberish as a process of releasing their words into a flow of change, or even as tossing their statements onto the flames of a pyre. I liked how my writing these garbled statements over the patterned surfaces rendered them even more obscure, until they really dissolved into a flow. The woodgrain had the added benefit of being useable to suggest the structure of buildings, and their collapse became a parallel for the collapse of meaning in the statements. In time, in changing times, this has come to seem like a reflection of current trends in our culture. Clashing truths.
Relief prints on paper mounted on gatorboard, oil pen, markers, paper maché, aluminum leaf, aluminum foil, acrylic paint, reverse-painted glass, running LED signs, scrambled, donated truth essences, dimensions variable
Essay by critic
Shana Nys Dambrot
Essay by curator
Tyler Stallings
Review in
Sculpture Magazine
