You approach the building under the fuzz and hum of a bone-colored calcium light. The door into the art installation is a beaten down screen door without any screens. You push it inward and enter to a blast of hot breath down your neck from the air system. There is no one inside. You slowly walk up to the first exhibit, glancing around, and read the tag. “Oija Bird by EJ Trask” You look at the piece, it makes you feel and see things. You are reminded of your grandmothers basement and the alienness of it as a child, the almost forbidden and secret dust, unknown objects stacked and tucked away. But the longer you look at Trask’s sculpture, the more those feelings rise up over you and sweep you away. You feel alone, trapped, scared. The sculpture begins to look sinister, and you see the shapes of dead things swimming in it now.
You hastily move away, glancing around, still seeing no one. You notice it’s now raining outside where it wasn’t when you entered. You step up to the next piece and read the gold tag, “The Palimpsest At Hookwood by Jon T.”
It’s a bizarre piece, at first you don’t know what you’re looking at. The more you stare, the more intrigued you become. You see many birds in what resembles trench warfare, the gray corpses of squirrels dotting the piece. You look closer, fascinated. It reminds you of a diaroma you once saw of World War II.
The tag below the next piece reads, “The Tasteless Death of Lance Green by Sean Thomas McDonnell”. It feels like satin on the back of your eyes, and you smell faint cigarillo. There is something nagging at your senses, something about the piece that sits crooked in your head. It gives the same feeling as a beautifully captured image of a predetor devouring its hard-won prey. A micro-quake shakes its way up your spine.
You move to the next installation, a look about reveals the room a vast shadowy space, vaulted ceiling hiding in shadow. You think nothing of this and read the tag below the next piece. “A Feathering by A.P. Murphy”. Just looking at the piece makes your mouth dry and your skin itch. It’s rough, abrasive, and smells of pitch, tar, roadwork. There is a heat pulsing from it, and you are reminded of old engravings featuring harpies and tragedies.
The fluorescents flicker in tandem with your fluttering heart, and when you look about there is nothing but black void and the next exhibit. You step to it and read the tag. “Outnumbed by William Pauley III” It is lonely, isolated, and unsettling. It is a silence of loud insect sounds in a forest filled with emptiness. Your fingers tingle. You smell decay and pine tar.
The little gold sign on the next exhibit reads “Corvus and Crater by Will Boucher”. It immediately makes you deeply thirsty, as though you feel your organs being sun-dried and shriveled. Its too bright to look at, painfully so. It makes jerky of your eyes.
You blink rapidly and move to the final exhibit, feeling eyes on you.
The tag glints and you read “Ravens by Michelle Bardsley“. You look carefully at the piece, and it shrinks away from your gaze. Evaporates. Its dark and fascinating and partially obscured. You look carefully at the piece. It cowers away from your sight.
You leave in a rush and the entire experience becomes a hazy dream you’re not sure you had. I watch you leave, smiling from the rafters, smiling smiling smiling.
