Waiting Room (2022)
For this installation at Triangle Projects in downtown Los Angeles, I borrowed and photographed waiting room decor from therapists and counselors that I’ve seen — a toy aquarium, a white noise machine, a cylindrical tank with silicone jellyfish. Enlarged photos of the toy aquarium were printed on transparency film and transferred onto the windows of the space in late June 2022, during one of LA’s first summer heat waves. The space had no air conditioning, and the transfers required that I apply a layer of photo transfer solution mixed with 91% isopropyl alcohol (the same stuff used to disinfect wounds). While the solution was still wet, I pressed the transparency film, ink side down, onto the window. But since it was so hot, the solution began to evaporate as soon as I applied it, and the images peeled off like pieces of sunburnt skin.
In the middle of the room is what I’m calling my dad’s zen tabletop garden. This used to be in his office when I was a child, and since I often had to wait long hours there for him to get off work, I spent a lot of time looking at it (or playing Nokia Snake II . . . Hunched over the tiny screen, I pressed, and the snake roamed in right angles, eating pixels that resembled spiders and snails. As the snake got longer and longer, hungrier and hungrier, faster and faster, it accelerated and became so insatiable that it became a danger to itself. Eventually, it ate itself, my game ended, and I would start all over again, or stare at this shell.)
Inside the shell is sand my dad collected from Newport Beach, marbles, this blue plastic star that I think came off of a $1 tabletop decoration from IKEA, and smaller shells, some of which I collected as a child (California horn snail shells, purple dwarf olive shells). The egg-yolk-looking thing is an old mouse trackball. Through my dad’s zen shell-garden, I’m thinking about technology and doom-scrolling in the anthropocene. What happens when the trackball is taken out of its original context and transformed into an object for stillness and contemplation?
In the middle of the room is what I’m calling my dad’s zen tabletop garden. This used to be in his office when I was a child, and since I often had to wait long hours there for him to get off work, I spent a lot of time looking at it (or playing Nokia Snake II . . . Hunched over the tiny screen, I pressed, and the snake roamed in right angles, eating pixels that resembled spiders and snails. As the snake got longer and longer, hungrier and hungrier, faster and faster, it accelerated and became so insatiable that it became a danger to itself. Eventually, it ate itself, my game ended, and I would start all over again, or stare at this shell.)
Inside the shell is sand my dad collected from Newport Beach, marbles, this blue plastic star that I think came off of a $1 tabletop decoration from IKEA, and smaller shells, some of which I collected as a child (California horn snail shells, purple dwarf olive shells). The egg-yolk-looking thing is an old mouse trackball. Through my dad’s zen shell-garden, I’m thinking about technology and doom-scrolling in the anthropocene. What happens when the trackball is taken out of its original context and transformed into an object for stillness and contemplation?
24–09–2024