project image
Ezra Thomson
WRAP

first performed on February 2, 2011
public walkways throughout Brooklyn, NY, public walkways throughout Brooklyn, NY
performed 21 times in 2011

MOIRA WILLIAMS

Brooklyn, NY
moira670@gmail.com
moira670@gmail.com

WRAP
MOIRA WILLIAMS

Wearing a white shirt that has disposable cameras strapped and sewn into it, I carry a bucket filled with local gauze, milk and flour. I dip the gauze into the mixture, wrap it around my left hand, unwrap and repeat while the mixture thickens and splatters upon the city’s surfaces, leaving its mark. The gesture is repeated until I stand up and walk to another site. I walk throughout public places that hold an echoing sound quality that directly results from the surrounding architecture so that my voice reverberates when announcing the marks that have made by the mixture.

Each camera attached to the shirt is positioned so the viewer cannot easily take a photo of me directly as they are inclined to do so with their own cameras. Many people participated while others used their own devices. By supplying cameras for the participants to look through, I offer a playful game of observation that is similar to looking through a microscope because of the distance relationship I have introduced. The relationships also create multiple perspectives and may connect ways of seeing how architecture, spatial politics, labor and visual and social media add and subtract from our view. The work also bears witness to the individual’s mark and presence.

Documenting the performance by inviting viewers’ participation is one of my interests. The resulting documentation is life-sized images of me during the performance, printed out in color onto individual 8” x 10” sheets. Each sheet is glued onto cardboard, the cardboard is cut out following the image’s shape, with a cardboard support attached to the back so that the “poster” can stand on its own. The piece is placed in the sites where I performed and is similar to movie cut-outs. Splashing of the mixture occurs and remains upon multiple surfaces in the plazas and walkways. I see the connection as a body being spread out into the spatial layers of the surrounding buildings an invisible city, a liminal connection. Is that the connection to the cameras? Are they an embodied extension of the surrounding physical structures and my body? Am I discussing over saturation or apathy of the image? Thoughts that certainly need to be worked out. Or am I complicating the work with multiple layers?