Sunset-Sunrise (2020)
18″ x 18″ x 18″
CRT monitor shell, glass, solder, rotisserie motor, light

The rising of light over the horizon has signaled the coming of a new day since time immemorial. But what if you’d been awake staring at a screen since the sun went down, driven not by any desire or need to do anything in particular, but by something between a fear of abandoning the comforting hum of the constant stimulus of an endless scroll and dread at the prospect of stepping away to reflect on the life you’d been neglecting. Your diurnal habit undermined like a tourist above the arctic circle during some crazed, endless hell-dream of a summer, with no one to blame but yourself. The longer you stay plugged in, the greater your shame on surfacing, and thus the greater the depth of your present denial, a circle of compounding incentives with no positive outcome. The catch-22 of any good addiction.

Sunset-Sunrise aims to evoke that feeling of numbing repetition nursing a thin layer of calm that overlays anxiety. Removing the screen of an old CRT monitor and replacing its innards with an inward bowing glass slope surrounded by mirrors and illuminated from behind by a rotating stained glass drum yields a diorama of sorts. Bands of colored light are born at the base of the screen, where glass triangles and their reflected counterparts meet like the mouth of some digital monster vomiting forth its constant spew of content, welling out to swallow the viewer. The geometry of the screen creates an implied inertia which is counter to this play of light, causing an apparent acceleration towards the viewer. Meanwhile, mirrors bounding both sides create internal reflections which beckon the viewer closer to peer around the corner at an apparently infinite extension.