Short Statement:
Cellar door is an animation built up from fragments of imagery found in the former Hollywood Video space at 1530 East 53rd Street. Starting with footage captured while exploring the basement, and in the spirit of an ad hoc response to the space, I am buidling up a fluid, associative series of movements. Using my drawings together with input from artists and visitors to the space, I will be pushing the animation forward throughout the time frame of the exhibit so that the duration and layers of iterations in the piece shift over time, and are updated in the space on a regular basis. The result is an animation and drawings that evolve throughout the run of the exhibit and afterwards serve as a memorable revisiting of the emotive qualities of the site.
The title refers both to the surprising door we found in the basement of the building and to ongoing discussion, dating back to the late 19th century, of the phonic elegance of the phrase “cellar door” in literary and linguistic analysis. Associations with this phrase, also encountered in pop references from Poison’s Talk Dirty to Me to the 2001 film Donnie Darko, inform possibilities for fantasy, foreboding, and the macabre.
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