Artist Statement: 1001 NIGHTS
Imagine walking into a darkened room and stretching out before you is a glowing landscape of transformed bottles.
1001 NIGHTS is an installation created over a period of eight years. It is comprised of 1001 wine bottles, each dated and numbered, each
embellished from within or without.
The bottles tell stories and represent moments, hours, and days, like a series of self-portraits or the 1001 stories Scheherazade told King Shahryar to save her life in The Arabian Nights.
The bottles are at different levels on stacked wine crates, doors and shelves. Some are below your feet, some are above your sight line, and some float around the perimeter. You can wander through the maze, stopping along the way to examine particular bottles. You can choose to hear an oral history linked to the bottles’ origins and chronology, sometimes personal, sometimes connected to historic events. Several assemblages reflect a calamity in which 25 bottles fell to the floor from a great height onto armatures and glass below.
Sea-life, old age, water, foliage, bondage, dreams, childhood are given form. Some bottles make music, some smell like fields of lilacs, some can be picked up and examined in your hand, others are too dangerous to handle.
1001 NIGHTS is a landscape, a vast and quixotic project, an embodied experience of exuberance, sadness, failure, and questioning. Awareness of the passage of time is constant as the bottles are dated and, in some groupings, arranged chronologically.
Influences include Marina Abramowitz’s The Artist Is Present, Jay De Fao’s obsessive layered painting, The Rose, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Stravinsky Fountain at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Giorgio Morandi’s somber still lifes, and the startling colors of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits.
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M. Jane Balanoff
New York |
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