Jeffrey Schiff

  

O Sole Mio
 
   

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Boston Center for the Arts
Year: 1990
Materials: wood, sheetrock, steel, rubber, casters, tape player
Dimensions: 10' x 13' x 7'

In a group exhibition in which Kennedy/Violich Architects had been commissioned to design individual spaces for artist installations, I built a movable room so that I could control my own social relations with the other artists in the exhibition. A small conventional room was built on large casters. Punting oars penetrated the sides of the room so that the occupant could push off the floor and blindly steer the room around the exhibition hall. A recording of Caruso singing O Sole Mio continuously played into the room through a vent high on the back wall.

O SOLE MIO
"Installation and Place" Boston Center for the Arts 1990

I conceived of O SOLE MIO (wandering) in response to the specific terms of the exhibition: an architect was to design an architecture to house 16 individual artists' installations. This constituted a direct reversal of my customary working procedure in which I respond sculpturally to a given architecture. I felt that I could not allow myself to be connected to a larger superstructure, particularly one I knew nothing about. It was a political question regarding the relationship of individual to commune. It seemed that the only way I could participate was as an independent structure, unfixed in location and relationship to the whole - within the exhibition structure but now quite of it. My installation, rather than occupying a room, would be the room itself which would wander aimlessly around the larger space of the Cyclorama. The piece reflects the condition of the artist - the job and melancholy of being alone.

Behold the brilliant sun in all its splendor, Forgotten is the storm, the clouds now vanish, The fresh'ning breezes, heavy airs will banish, Behold the brilliant sun in all its splendor!

A sun I know of that's brighter yet, This sun, my dearest, 'tis naught but thee, The face, so fair to see, That shall now my sun forever be.

Behold the radiant sun mid evening shadows, With golden light it covers all creation, Until it sinks below the world's foundation. Behold the radiant sun mid evening shadows.

A sun I know that's brighter yet, This sun, my dearest, 'tis naught but thee, Thy face, so fair to see, That shall now my sun forever be.

Eduardo Di Capua