The installation "Fux-Galantes" is an immersive aesthetic environment, in which participants are encouraged to interact with a variety of painted and sculpted components, simultaneously discovering and arranging materials as they generate continually evolving compositions. New layers of meaning emerge and dissolve as viewers create combinations accidental or intentional. Each individual's imagination, curiousity, and emotional reaction to the presentation helps determine the course of their own experience and that of others who may follow.

An ever-shifting tableau-vivante of color and chaos, "Fux-Galantes" borrows motifs from Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Victorian sources, as well as old medical imagery, pornography, valentines, and other collected ephemera. The title, "Fux-Galantes", is a play on the French term fête galante (literally "gallant party") and the words "flux" and "fucks" ... "gallant fucks". The work depicts the processes of evolution, the collapsing of aesthetic and temporal boundaries by use of appropriation and juxtaposition, and the generation of meaning by consensus and contextualization.

The work incorporates a broad variety of materials, including painted canvas, collages, letters, toilet plungers, cardboard, fabric, dresses, masks, stockings, paper, boxes, bottles, push-pins, fake flowers, suitcases, buckets, ropes, trimmings, plastic eggs, baby toys, bones, tampons, feathers, frames, fans, pillows, prosthetics, crutches, straps, shoes, costumes, parasols, and other props. Participants can also involve their own and each other's bodies in improvised stagings, creating theatrical and expressive scenes with their gestures, positions, and movements.

"Fux-Galantes" has been mounted twice so far ... in 2002, at Boston's ONI Gallery (seen in the stills above), and in 2004, at the Bakalar Gallery, as part of my MFA Thesis show at the Massachusettts College of Art (seen in the clickable thumbnails below).

Click on any of the images below to open a full-size image in another window. Please make sure that your browser is not disabling pop-ups. All of the images below are from the Bakalar Gallery show, in 2004, taken over the two-week duration of the exhibition. Every day, the scene changed.