NYAB Event - Malachi Farrell "Strange Fruit in the Streets"

Malachi Farrell "Strange Fruit in the Streets"

Jane Kim / Thrust Projects

This event has ended.

In his latest installation, Malachi Farrell uses shoes as a metaphor for our present situation. He questions the basic necessity to wear, own and buy shoes and what that means in today's recession. Farrell takes the iconography of shoes hanging in the streets on wires and transforms them into strange fruit, recalling a poem written in the 1930's by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx who wrote under the pen name Lewis Allen. Popularly known as a song by Billy Holiday, "Strange Fruit" describes the 1937 lynching of two black men in Indiana.

Farrell uses "Strange Fruit" as a point of departure to the current moment, bringing to the forefront the problem of poverty. Farrell applies his strange fruit to the environment of New York, asking "Are we hanging by a thread?" Four clusters of worn shoes and sneakers are tied together with cables, suspended from the ceiling of the gallery like chandeliers. Each grouping contains approximately 40 - 50 shoes. Six are outfitted with electronic mechanisms, LED lights and mini sound systems that open the toe of the shoes to play "She Loves You" by Peter Sellers (original German version), a cover of the Beatles' hit.

Malachi Farrell' deals with major political and social issues, past and present, in a narrative mode. He combines craft and ingenious technology to achieve a Gesamkunstwerk (synthesis of arts) through the use of sound, light, machines, everyday materials and articulated objects. Crucial to the understanding Farrell's work is that his sculptures are not fixed objects, but spectacular, overwhelming, grotesque, moving apparatuses in a multi-dimensional space.

Born in Dublin in 1970, Malachi Farrell resides in Paris, France.

[Image: Malachi Farrell "Strange Fruit in the Streets" (2009) Courtesy Centre d'Art le LAIT, Albi, France]