List of works
"Buggy"
Joonas Timmi (Wood, electronics, other mixed media)
Joonas Timmi will design and manufacture a buggy to be set into the circular track running through the gallery.
The buggy can hold 2 adults at a time and appear to be fully functional, however the sculpture itself is stationary. The artists will create semiotic context around this work to create the impression that the buggy is dysfunctional, and the ride is out of service.
“Star Jet in the Non-Place”
Zody Burke & Karmo Järv (Video)
Concept
The slow heat-death of the American economy under neoliberal late-stage capitalism has ensured that post-9/11 generations will never experience the comfortable lifestyle of their forebears. With a decimated middle class, cripplingly low wages for the growing population existing in perpetual poverty, and as language struggles to catch up with these issues, the new American adult is one who suffers from arrested development. Where is the demarcation between childhood and adulthood in 2022, when we can barely take care of ourselves, much less make decisions about the future?
In Entropy Gauntlet, artist Zody Burke explores this question through the actualization of a personal threshold of memory. Her work “Star Jet in the Non-Place” depicts her favorite childhood roller coaster to which she made frequent pilgrimages as a young girl. Growing up in Brooklyn, she was occasionally given the exciting opportunity to visit family in the beach town of Seaside Park, New Jersey, which was the first place that she remembers experiencing wonder, joy, and all of those good emotions that are much more easily found when one is very young. Her family began experiencing financial difficulties around her teenage years and ended up having to sell the family home.
In 2012, a year after leaving the nest and moving to Baltimore on her own, the rollercoaster Star Jet was swept into the ocean by Hurricane Sandy.
The work is inspired by subsequent photos that were broadcasted on news outlets all over the country of the roller coaster wreckage partially submerged in a wrathful, roiling sea.
For the artist, the roller coaster image recalls a fossil record; resembling the massive skeleton of an impossibly large ancient creature; an extinct megafauna for which no amount of longing will ever satiate her. The artist has viewed this event as an extremely public experience of the death of her childhood, and a very clear line drawn in the sand about the type of future she can expect from a world experiencing the foreboding birth-pangs of climate disaster.
Practical
The installation will consist of a massive screen (curved?) playing a 3d rendered video of the roller coaster partially submerged in a seemingly endless ocean. The video will be an immersive experience, animated by the artist in Blender, with help from 3D artist Karmo Järv. The video will be on a loop, with two separate sequences: the roller coaster in the ocean at night during a raging storm, and the roller coaster at dawn in a tranquil, placid sea.
Hot Tub Piece (III)
Zody Burke (Fiberglass, electronics, other mixed media)
"Hot Tub Piece (III)" is the final phase in a three-part sequence. The first iteration of the piece was displayed in Kanuti Gildi Saal for the show "Staying in the Compost: Ghosts & Monsters of the Anthropocene" and the second phase exists as a video.
Born out of a fetish-driven longing for ergonomic consumer objects, and constructed in an historic Estonian metal casting hangar where countless busts of Soviet leaders were produced, Hot Tub Piece exists as an anomalous emblem of the architecture of leisure and desire, and the absurd incursion of late capitalist values into unexpected terrain. The artist's inevitable failure to replicate a sleek factory-direct facade has instead resulted in a Cronenbergian edifice; more closely resembling a cavernous relic which has become host to its own ecosystem.
Dotted across the preened backyards of American suburbia is a variegated colony of hot tubs, many of which will inevitably become waste due to the negligence of their purchasers and the complexity of their mechanization. This work attempts to contemplate the membrane between the acquisition of luxury goods and the moment when they become waste, and speculate on the consequences, both individual and global.
This work is situated in an artist-built room in the gallery that has been furnished and decorated to look like a motel room.
Looking straight ahead is, in effect, looking at the floor of this strange room. Attached to this ‘floor’ is a life-sized sculpture of a hot tub.
From behind, a projection-mapped simulation of water begins to appear and pool inside the tub, complete with realistic sound. Suddenly, the hot tub begins to crack. On a network of RaspberryPi-controlled chains and pulleys, the hot tub breaks into three sections and comes apart, expanding from its center, and the simulated water spills out onto the floor.
This sequence is timed, and will repeat itself when the next set of viewers enters the room.
Deconstructed Motel Room (Corners Pieces / Television Pieces)
Taylor Tex Tehan (Wood, plexiglass, carpet, wallpaper, video, other mixed media)
After leaving the hot tub room, the viewer enters a deconstructed room that resembles the shadow of the same motel room. All that remain are dream fragments; disjointed corners and cross sections of disembodied architecture. The empty space between the sculptures symbolizes the inevitable entropy of memory and the finitude of mortality; holes poked into the tapestry of the daily mundane, receding as darkness back into the domain of the stars.
This work references a section of a real motel located in the same region of New Jersey, where the artist and his family spent many nights during his childhood. These works collectively will create a dialogue with one another about the dystopian future of what America represents, the romanticization of something that may or may not have existed, and questions our perception of time. The works also consider how these scenes create a different discourse when placed in a new context. These “places” become ghosts when we think about what they were, and the memory becomes nostalgia.
Accompanying the disembodied architectural sculptures are 2-4 old television sets, playing a pre-recorded amalgamation of video taken in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, static, and fragmented LiDAR digital renderings of the same landscapes.
Guitar Piece
Lauri Raus (sound)
For the exhibition, Lauri Raus will write and record a new and original instrumental sound work. The piece will have atmospheric and ambient qualities while harmonizing with the surrounding art objects in a way that evokes a "post-western" melancholia. The work will be audible at a low level throughout the space, but the sound will be focused on the climax area of the show, where the "Star Jet" video is playing.
A conceptual reference for this work is Bruce Naumann's "End of the World" piece.
Billboard Piece
Taylor Tex Tehan (Wood, Metal, Wheat Paste Poster, Spray Paint)
An installation work that will simulate a large, highwayside billboard. The billboard will showcase a worn out advertisement for a motel.
The starting point for this project will be the installation of the billboard at an undisclosed public location in Tallinn; somewhere where the city won’t bother with removing it, but others may be encouraged to interact with it. The billboard will exist in this location for several months leading up to the opening of Entropy Gauntlet. The artist will allow outside actors to contribute to the project during this time; weathering, rust, vandalization, artistic intervention, and decay are all possible participants in this project. At the end of the allotted time, the billboard will be dismantled and reassembled in EKA Gallery.
The intention is to create a participatory project that, with every act of participation, decentralizes and dislocates any assumed spatial context, and begins to embody a speculative future in which anthropocentric ideas like nationality and late capitalism become a disjointed memory, or a distant afterthought.
"Miss Vaike-Ameerika"
Zody Burke (Denim, other mixed media)
This life-sized sculpture of a shadowy cowgirl figure will be seated in the first transitional area of the show, directly after the front loading/"reception" room.
Instead of holding a book as is pictured here, she will be holding a glass of wine.
She will be placed next to "Table for the Spirits" by Joonas Timmi.
"Table for the Spirits"
Joonas Timmi (Birch, stainless steel)
An endtable designed by Joonas Timmi.
Joonas may also make more furniture pieces to be shown in Entropy Gauntlet.
Stop Motion Mississippi
Zody Burke (Video, sound)
A video work from 2021 playing on a television (with headphones) situated in the first room (the loading/reception room). Set to a track by Zody’s ‘experimental country’ band Buck Young, the visuals include her denim cowgirl alter-ego traversing the lunar landscapes of the Burren in western Ireland. There is spoken word voiceover gleaned from the writing of Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce, blended with Zody’s own poetry.
Click image for full video →
Clouds
Tex Tehan, Zody Burke, Joonas Timmi, Lauri Raus
(LED lights, pillow stuffing)
The artists will create LED-lighted cloud sculptures to be suspended from the ceiling in two different areas above the works.
The lights will move and fluctuate, creating a dramatic night-time feeling.
