Front Window, Wichita, KS May 2008

Front Window, a combined installation and performative video work, was created by The Bridge Club for the River City Biennale in Wichita, Kansas in May 2008. The video was projected on a large scrim at Fisch Haus Gallery, while the installation was housed in a separate site at Heterotopia. The video’s footage shows human activity within the installation environment, but this activity exists only within the video-- the viewer encounters the installation as an uninhabited space.

The installation utilizes the context of the surrounding neighborhood and the manmade geography of Wichita, whose characteristic brick structures and many vacated retail spaces point to a discrepancy between the buildings’ former vitality and their current, diminished role in public life. The installation visually aims to blend in with this environment— taking the shape of yet another once-vibrant human space that has been left to sit empty.

The video activates the space of the installation— though never in real-time, but only in the viewer’s memory. The video exists in the gallery context, and is displayed as art using the stylistic, technological, and conventional display mechanisms of contemporary art, whereas the installation negates all such visual designations through its resemblance of the surrounding environment.

The video, like many contemporary cultural forms, relies heavily upon nostalgia. It activates the space of the installation in a romanticized vision of what was (though this in itself may take the form of what never was). The installation itself, on the other hand, stoically asserts that what is—and its history—need not nor could not be in any other way. The installation affirms the ‘what-is’ in its implicit visual agreement.