NYAB Event - "The Handler of Gravity" Exhibition

"The Handler of Gravity" Exhibition

Essex Street

This event has ended.

Beneath the horizon, a chariot or sleigh, a water-mill, a small gear engaged with a large wheel, a trap-door to the basement, a pulley. Not shown: the revolution of the bottle of Bénédictine. And Sandow. A blown-out, kinetoscopic vision of mustachioed Prussian bodybuilder Eugen Sandow performing his stunted dance – flexing, swelling, and preening – is not shown. At left, nine floating moulds, a chess player’s cemetery of uniforms and liveries, organs, shells, containers for gas. The priest, the delivery boy, the gendarme, the cavalryman, the policeman, the undertaker, the servant, the busboy, the station-master, intersected, crossed and bound by lines, fissures, remedies, and capillary tubes. Adjacent to these, sieves tossed off in an arc, successive moments in the trajectory of a single sedge hat thrown over a hurdle. A pair of open scissors, sharpened on both sides, hovers laterally above a triad of variegated bass drums anchored to a tiered, Louis XV table, or what could be a chocolate grinder. Immodest – lewd, even – the machine gnashes and churns. Forensic evidence, a body bereft. His three dimensions to her four. You remove all items from your pockets. You strap into the seat. You put your money in the slot. You press start. On the upper pane, The Bride – joints, curves, axles, a beak – is suspended at farthest remove from the region of the Butterfly Pump and the path of the illuminating gas. Her instructions flow through the draught pistons in the Milky Way out to the nine shots, then back again, eluding the Handler of Gravity, the trivet, the rod, the weight, the horizon beneath.

*Script for hypnosis written by Angie Keefer for Raimundas Malasauskas' Hypnotic Show, 2011.