A woman in a deconstructed grey wool coat, one knee raised, leans over a stack of three old television sets sealed inside clear acrylic boxes. Every screen shows the same thing: cumulus cloud on blue. Strings have been run down the front of the whole tower, over a bridge fixed to the lowest screen, and she draws a bow across them with her right hand while her left holds the neck of the instrument at the top. Her face is turned to us and entirely calm. The floor is plywood; the wall is white.
The construction is absurd and also carefully made — the bridge correctly placed, the strings properly spaced, the tailpiece anchored — so it is not a joke prop but an object that would, after a fashion, sound. Three televisions showing sky, boxed like museum specimens and strung as a cello: the machine that once brought the world into a room, sealed, muted, and repurposed into something that has to be played by hand.
I keep returning to the choice of cloud. It is the most photographed and least informative image there is, the thing a broadcast shows when it has nothing to show, and it fills all three screens identically. What the picture proposes, quietly, is a hierarchy. The television offers the same sky over and over and cannot be answered; the instrument makes nothing at all until a person decides to draw a bow across it. She stands at the point where the one becomes the other, and she is the only thing in the frame capable of producing something new.
A woman in a deconstructed grey wool coat, one knee raised, leans over a stack of three old television sets sealed inside clear acrylic boxes. Every screen shows the same thing: cumulus cloud on blue. Strings have been run down the front of the whole tower, over a bridge fixed to the lowest screen, and she draws a bow across them with her right hand while her left holds the neck of the instrument at the top. Her face is turned to us and entirely calm. The floor is plywood; the wall is white.
The construction is absurd and also carefully made — the bridge correctly placed, the strings properly spaced, the tailpiece anchored — so it is not a joke prop but an object that would, after a fashion, sound. Three televisions showing sky, boxed like museum specimens and strung as a cello: the machine that once brought the world into a room, sealed, muted, and repurposed into something that has to be played by hand.
I keep returning to the choice of cloud. It is the most photographed and least informative image there is, the thing a broadcast shows when it has nothing to show, and it fills all three screens identically. What the picture proposes, quietly, is a hierarchy. The television offers the same sky over and over and cannot be answered; the instrument makes nothing at all until a person decides to draw a bow across it. She stands at the point where the one becomes the other, and she is the only thing in the frame capable of producing something new.