if only there were a place just quiet and bright, that also smelled good

It is impossible to divorce an idea from our internal state. If you imagine the most simple idea or experience, and try to distill it to something even more basic, this final construction will still be at the whim of personal experience.

"if only there were a place just quiet and bright, that also smelled good" speaks to not only our ability to share an idea perfectly, but also to our ability to hold an idea within ourselves in some absolute fashion; you could say it represents both an externalized and internalized viewpoint on what it means to be absolute.

The title speaks to the externalized representation. The piece on a whole captures what should be something very simple: a space constructed to perfectly hold light, silence, and smell. But these simple building blocks are immediately tied into personal and cultural experiences. The smell of beeswax, or the heat of the room, or the sensation of ones eyes dilating to pinpoints, will draw up connections and emotions, that eventually cause the physicality of the room to expand outside of its rigid construction; the rigidly that is visible is actually a mask for what is inevitably fluid. This is hinted at with the slow progression of wax melting through the lights.

The motif of cubes within the sculpture play to the cubic nature of the room they are inside of. This is meant to nudge the viewer into considering that they themselves are also taking on a role of content/container within this relationship. Just as we can not expect the most simple of environmental constructions to promote the same emotion within a set of viewers, our internal constructions of what we perceive as simple and absolute are also shifting with time. We are less aware of these shifts, since the entirety of our concept of Self is changing, transforming the ideas within with each new state. Our absolutes that seem so structured and exact, are in fact built on a framework of Self that is evolving just as much as the ideas that that framework allows us to perceive. It's a not a statement suggesting that all is relative, but more that the rigidity and dimensionality of Self is something that only exists when we ignore the passage of time.

There is a short, informal interview that you can listen to regarding this work here.

Photo Credit: Tomáš Princ.