CURFEW
Rome, Italy
Curfew is a site specific installation provoking the loss of a larger space to fleeting apparitions of darkness and memory. Simply, the work is ghosting of a darkened window, made of the strange and violent spatial lines embedded with candlewicks burnt away and trailing smoke true to the term curfew (rooting in the French term ‘to cover the fire’ -- its the time to blow out the candles and go to bed). Fleeting and vanishing (both physically and in memory) the line work is a dance between the fewest lines that can be trusted, and the imagination projected on to a darkened reality. Suspended in the threshold between the two spaces, visitors to the show have to occupy the work--literally walking through it. Formally the aim is to evoke a larger sense of space (both real and imagined) and also calling to question the passing from one space to another -- where perhaps on both sides, different darknesses exist. Its implications and threat of vanishing is the unknown reality, one that seems familiar, though always unfamiliar. Curfew remains something that is there amongst us, but anxious, fleeting, and aggressive, though even frightened in its own being.
Curfew is also shown in relationship to the Nightly photography series.
Curfew was one of the 2 works presented by Catie Newell of *Alibi Studio in Christian Caliandro's CONCRETE GHOST show as part of the American Academy in Rome's Cinque Mostre 2014.
The artists gathered together in Concrete Ghost / Fantasma Concreto condense, in various ways, the diffuse sensation of suspension permeating the present moment. The idea is adapted from a text by Giorgio Vasta, Italian Affiliated Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. It is at once a very specific condition and, at the same time, an elusive and evanescent one. It is that of a ghost possessed of a body, senses, sensuality, and a brain that comprehends. The embodied ghost is the precise opposite of a vanishing body: it is rather immateriality assuming concrete physical form. The concrete ghost entails movement, tension, an oriented mechanism, an atmosphere of perfectly controlled and dominated obscurity.
The full set of participants for CONCRETE GHOSTS curated by Christian Caliandro:
Nanni Balestrini, Anna Gimon Betbeze, Hamlett Dobbins, Tony Fiorentino, Dan Hurlin, Catie Newell, Reynold Reynolds, Giuseppe Stampone, Marco Strappato, Thomas Kelley, Catherine Wagner
Curfew was supported by:
The American Academy in Rome
Office of Vice President of Research, University of Michigan