NO NEVER EVER
2010

The three sculptural elements of No Never Ever, while a single installation, address the problem of restraint in three distinct ways. The use of restraint is most extreme in the wall piece, which is literally unknowable in its entirety to the viewer. Because the conceptual basis for the project lies in restraint, it is difficult to decide how much should be said in an artist statement. But ultimately the project does not deal only with restraint, it tries to deal simultaneously in generosity, balancing between giving and withholding too much.

Giving too much and hiding too much are both risks. In the wall piece, they have been literalized as consecutive risks—how expansive can I be inside the wall, and then, how reductive, in the way I limit access to it?

In trying to force the viewer to engage physically with the work, I hope to implicate the viewer in the experience, to reverse the gaze from inside the wall, and to make looking into a voyeuristic experience. A lot is demanded explicitly from the viewer, in effect arguing for a rigorous approach to perception in general (Robert Irwin's experiments in sensory deprivation come to mind.) What is difficult about art? What makes art challenging?

There is something childish about hiding. A Brazilian friend once called me "Megalomaniac-inha," the diminutive megalomaniac—the simultaneous desire for grandiosity and for privacy constantly at odds. To some extent, everyone keeps private ambitions walled off. Duchamp worked in secret on his Étant donnés for twenty years, after having publicly abandoned and denounced "retinal," or visually appealing art. In fact, when is beauty not a private experience? The two sculptures external to the wall in No Never Ever serve as monuments to the closed-off nature of living in our own private bodies. They are extrapolated from drawings that exist inside the wall, the interior space serving as generative for the monumental creations we leave in the world, and in turn, they set up the syntax for a visual language by which the fragmented view of what is behind the wall can be read.

    By holding so much back behind the wall I do not intend to be cruel or, worse, stingy, anymore than I wish to be stingy with access to my own lovely organs by keeping my skin on. For most people, skin is desirable and necessary. Knowing a person does not stop at the skin, but neither does it extend to knowledge of the entire inner cavity. We get glimpses, we see a mirrored view of an interior whose dimensions are unknowable, and seem to change. Your memories of your childhood home or homes probably operate in this way. The size of remembered space is variable."