when something is nothing...

arriving in ny at 6 am on a sunday left me with little options. i spent a few hours having coffee in several different places and breakfast at another, and i finally walked over to central park, but i kept falling asleep on the bench and so i walked over to the met, which fortunately opens at 9 am!

upon entering the early egyptian artifacts, i noticed several display cases that had been emptied because of construction beneath the museum. instead of covering the display cases, they simply left them with their security armatures, which were actually quite fascinating, as well as reminiscent of calder's circus - as well as those early little wire pieces with shadows by c. boltanski.

while the artifacts would've been wonderful as well, their absence offered a wonderful excursion through line, light and shadow. in the late 1960's, before my grandmother was working with stone she was working with wire sculpture with some kind of liquid metal (lead?) dripped over them, and these ceramic protectors that the museum must've fabricated reminded me a lot of the skeletal armatures of her work, and i wondered what kind of forms they might have offered if my grandmother had added muscle, organs and skin. of course, the absence of the primary material was also a bit haunting - like the objects had walked away and in their absence they had left behind their shadows, and similarly as if such shadows were objects rather than artifacts of light. what's also interesting is that the armatures have a kind of fluidity that felt like writing or cryptic symbols...