Reconfiguration No. 28 (Blue)

The video shows a large rectangular expanse of blue. The edge of a tree peeks in the top left corner of the frame - other than that, there’s no context given, no indication of up or down, foreground or background: just a colour field that is at once infinitely deep and completely flat. A balloon enters the frame and begins to drift. we recognize this blue as the sky. The balloon gets smaller and smaller until it’s subsumed. Soon, there’s just the blue once more. Another balloon enters the frame, then another, and another still. They enter at different intervals, some being given their own time, their own space on the screen and in the sky, others entering in quick succession or simultaneously. They drift around each other, circling each other, encountering each other. A choreography that creates momentary constellations: now it looks like Cassiopeia, now Perseus, now Pleiades. The balloons drift together, they drift apart, they disappear. The space between them shrinks, grows, becomes charged, relaxes. A cloud drifts into the frame. Time is passing. More balloons. More clouds. We are watching the interaction of things and environment, the possible merging of things and environment. The balloons become a way to mark the passage of time, and all that that implies.

“Will we see those balloons again? . . . I almost said self instead of things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They’re just balloons, after all. Though balloons are filled with breath, and breath was what God put into the dust of the ground that time in the garden, and we all know how that turned out. Once you release your balloon, you open it up to the forces of randomness and chaos. Even God can’t be sure where it will go . . . One wants to follow the balloons, but only finds these traces. . . All this makes her work sound rather gloomy, I realize, but there’s a joy to it. . . And the balloons, also, there’s a joyfulness to them, winding up along columns of air. . . Certainly there’s something achingly sad about watching those balloons drift up, spinning end over end, away from the earth and each other. But at the same time: something beautiful, the way most sad things are beautiful. . . Somewhere a few counties over, the skin of a balloon hangs from a tree, gets caught up in a lawnmower. The process keeps going, whether or not we’re there to watch it.” - John Searcy, MFA Lecturer, Department of English, Cornell University

Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAnargj2_sE&t=126s

Reconfiguration No. 28 (Blue)
Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY
2013