DAVID WILSON: N a Hutch.,.,., un dera Stare. cAsE
December 6 – 29, 2013
Opening Reception – Sunday, December 15, 7PM
For immediate release
“So, then, an enlongated Siamese ligature united us.”
-Moby Dick, The Monkey-Rope, H. Meville, 1851
N a Hutch.,.,., un dera Stare. cAsE: The title, culled from the 1889 Jacob Riis article, How The Other Half Lives, is the basis for Wilson’s subterranean installation at NOVELLA.
With N a Hutch.,.,., un dera Stare. cAsE, Wilson has researched the history of the street, buildings and neighborhood, where the gallery is located and sourced lumber and metals that were produced and used over a 135 year span of time. The wood comes from both a former tenement building and an upstate New York 19th century barn that supplied goods to the area.
The music box, often brought from Europe to New York by 19th century immigrants, was a technology that provided wonder and intimacy as a personal affect, but also conjured memories…a way to remember experiences and perception from another time and place.
Many nails from the two buildings were dissolved into a rust paste and used as a patina for the surface of the music box. Several others were used as the pins in the rotating cylinder, plucking the comb spokes to produce the sounds. The scale, volume and resonant qualities of the music box were tuned to the actual space, and acoustics, of the gallery, a basement of a former tenement building. The tune is composed from the first letters of the streets that grid the neighborhood surrounding the gallery…and air, from the buildings air shaft, is pumped into the structure to help activate the motor that turns the music box’s cylinder, in an attempt to re-construct and merge experience and perceptions within an architecture.
—David Wilson
