text by Joyce Ho
People make their way through everyday life, following time's framework: its years, months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds...all the incidental events of our daily lives, our chance encounters, even what we take to be fate—our ways of judging these things are all based on the connection with time.
The form of "A Day," attaches to our familiar experience of life: Cycles, relationships, rituals, dialogues, spaces, events...its foundation is laid on our perceptions of everyday situations. This performance/installation/video work connects time with our everyday relationships, and seeks to break through the temporal aspects usually involved in performance and viewing artworks. Time, then, becomes a clue about the performance/space, a suggestive reminder. In the midst of all these regularities that surround us, it serves to magnify, and even to transform, certain very tiny and easily overlooked chinks, to magnify the rituals so easily overlooked in our lives, to urge the viewer toward reflection on the details of everyday life. Once we depart from our familiar modes and sense the reminders from beyond these everyday regularities, is it possible that after we return to reality, some questions may be raised in the midst of those regularities?
In scenes from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, everyone speculates about Oz: Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man all describe a different Oz. In the first room of "A Day," we hear the museum guide (a criminal) describing works that remain unseen behind their doors, works which, like the emperor's new clothes, can be described yet at the same time cannot be described. What different viewers see on different days is just a room, but as they consider what lies behind the other doors, and why it can't be seen, they experience the same state as in our everyday lives: our anticipation of—and our inability to anticipate—the future.
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