Exhibition: Observatory
Posted: March 16th, 2022 | Author: Mary Jeys | Filed under: exhibition, mfa-thesis, portals, Unknowing, winter | No Comments »
Observatory exhibition, Tahoe Gallery, Sierra Nevada University, Nevada
January 2022
Mary Jeys and Sarah Logan
The work presented in Observatory was the first version of presenting from the archive of collected livestream videos. I presented a burning candle at a window at sunset on a TV monitor, a pot of water going from cold-poured to boiling on an iPad, and myself and my own watching and waiting on an iPhone. I installed a dorm room to call to the visitor’s mind and body an experience of watching and waiting at a networked happening in a site-specific sleeping quarters. I chose to perform toasting bread as an everyday activity that shifts bread or stale bread to palatable toast.
The work was available not only in the gallery, but also on Twitch whose daily active users spend an average of 95 minutes watching streamers stay at their camera for over 8 hours in any given day. The opportunity that I saw was to introduce my own artistic play into a place of durational long watching that might offer an introspective offering that could invite a togetherness across the experience of our screens.
I view this work as an invitation to consider our position of solo screen time as both a site of unknowing or otherspace that can invite or provoke emotional conditions for change within the visitor and to point to the place of online engagement as instructive in our solitude.
Untitled Portal, Candle
Video of recorded livestream, video monitor
Livestreamed October 18, 2021 TRT: 02:34:37
