“Dracula Is In This Room” | 2023 | 2000 hand-cast plaster tiles arranged on an approx. 14x16 ft. subfloor. Faint text written on gallery wall reading “DRACULA IS IN THIS ROOM”, script spans 12” tall and 20 ft. long. Notebook containing an excerpt from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, transcribed in the artist’s hand.
Artist Statement | The artist casts the body as a tool of production, making thousands of plaster tiles to construct a perfect infinite projection — a raised floor interrupted by a cut on two sides. This stage is unwalkable, unenterable, and evidences scant trace of the artist’s hand. It is a sterile un-invitation to dance with the burdened vampire whose name echoes out from the room unseen; “Dracula Is In This Room”, faintly etched into a far wall. Their work tastes of a frightened insistence against something new, and a harried concealment of something dangerously autobiographical. It is, as written by Pessoa in the notebook tacked to the wall, a dream of a new sort — a soft and shapeless thing, that reverberates like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth: a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death.
* The above image is digitally enhanced to reveal the hand-drawn wall text in the room.
NOTATIONS | The note-taking half of this practice, journeying the arrival to the floor. All images were drawn before the first tile was laid.
