Dani Dodge
2015
Interactive installation at Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay, OR
16x19-foot room
(2016 reinstalled at Gallery 825, Los Angeles)
Summary: Fragile vintage bird cages stuffed with heavy rocks were piled on the museum floor. One wall was covered with a cream-colored mixed-media painting incorporating bandages and sutures. Videos danced on window screens: birds flying, planes lifting off into the air. Visitors followed the instructions posted at the entrance of the museum gallery and pick up a rock from the pile near the door. They felt its weight, its smoothness, its capacity. They wrote on it their own personal burden, then walked across the room and put it on a pile of other rocks, also written with words such as fear, poverty, and inertia. A boulder floated above them. Visitors knew that when the exhibit was over, Dodge would take each of the burdens and hurl them into the ocean.
People left (un)burdened.
Materials: vintage bird cages, video, window screens, rocks from across the country, Styrofoam sculpture (of rocks), bandages, sutures, paint.