rosie & the monolith

in this minimalist yet expansive installation void-based artist ooQ erects fundamental questions of place and relation. integrating the functionally mundane in juxtapositions of material and utility rosie and the monolith subtly evokes the uncanny through softly comic subversions

 

ostensibly the room contains only 4 thin strips of new carpet, a fluffy white pillow, an inactive robot vacuum, 2 indoor ladders, as well as less easily identifiable objects such as reversed boot mats posing as art pieces, a waterfall of old faintly-smelly carpets half-discreetly lurking in a corner, a collapsed plastic storage container, numerous random small household objects on the mantle … and near the center an inescapable striped box monolith supporting a mildly broken wooden clothes drying rack … the overall impression one of commodious and comfortable disorganization, of work that not only isn’t being done but can’t be done, stultified by its own silent self-consciousness

 

what does one do in this room? vaguely suggesting domesticity its understated irrationality and absurdity destabilize our expectations. one’s inexorably drawn to walk a square around the monolith on the 4 carpets, liminally summoning the frequently unconscious movement inevitabilities of customer flow in retail space management environments … but equally compelled to wander off, arousing notions of border and transgression – as if the carpets were suspended over an infinite nothingness and to move off them to fall into voids of ... of what? domesticity? artifacts? proscription? and in this negation of purchase are these commodities or anti-commodities … are they even objects? or are we? what’s questioning what?

 

all this in a stately but modest and well-windowed room which in its variegations of light and shadow playing on the floor and walls might be a scene near the end of 2001: a space odyssey after Dr. Bowman is transmogrified and the universe collapses into a simple room of ambiguous and mystical quotidiana – a geometry of displacement, of the thing questioning its own thingness by means of equal proximate questionings, shapes nearly animate in their uneventfulness

 

and how do we respond to the title – rosie and the monolith – which seems to define too much what must defy definition? why not carpets old and new or a tottering rack? and who is rosie?

expressing the inexpressible through the expressible this quietly daring work challenges our often unquestioned assumptions of space … and through space – time, object, money, identity … and reality itself 

rosie & the monolith first appeared

in fatapor gallery on an east side in a decline of empire

before the cliffs of memory

before an opening that never happened

before an after that might have been before