Empty Rooms Love the Dark
2022
Installation at ENSA, Bourges, France.
Bookends, snail shells, rotating display stands, molded plastic chairs, oscillating fan, silk, glass, charcoal face mask, synthetic fur, images manually removed from the Flickr-Faces-HQ dataset.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I’m in another country and it’s summer, way further north of the latitude where I normally live, so the light keeps strange hours for me. When it’s finally dark, everything sounds uneasy outside my window. I stay awake reading minor news stories and encyclopedia entries until they all start to feel related. It gets bright again before the morning, and my body feels hungry and edgy all the time during the day.
I read one night that humans are some of the only mammals that aren’t nocturnal. That struck me as melancholy somehow. What happened to us? Some scientists hypothesize that our earliest ancestors were small rodents that evolved to live at night in order to avoid predatory dinosaurs who were active during the day. Later on, as humans found an evolutionary niche to exploit in the daytime and branched off to become diurnal, most other mammals just continued to operate in the dark… read full exhibition text here
