Water Torture is exhibited in a darkened chamber at the threshold of perception. Amber light illuminates the exterior of the barrel and the faces of the five television cabinets huddled at the bottom of the barrel. The silver glow of the television tubes inside the barrel provides the primary light source for the environment. All power and video feed cables are hidden below the exhibition floor.

The lighting conditions of this piece often create a sense of displacement in visitors. Several viewers have reported an inability to judge the size of the exhibition chamber. Lighting was amplified for documentation sake in these photographs.

Each of the five television sets are one-of-a-kind models, hand-crafted from my designs. While designing these, I researched vintage radio and television cabinet designs.
Pictured left: a set made of pine and maple with a 5" picture tube, covered in straight and birdseye maple veneering. Pictured right: a 7" tube cabinet with a rounded back in three tones of maple veneering.
These five sets sit huddled at the bottom of the barrel, just out of arms reach, facing up, in dim light. This combination of elements has evoked in many viewers a dynamic of an unfulfilled desire to more fully experience these television cabinets. This desire is simultaneously disconcerting and delightful. The dynamic serves as a stage for the five channel video loop playing on the televisions.
The videos' iconic imagery includes a house of cards that magically builds itself, the motion of a fish fleeting out of the frame, and a piece of costume jewelry modeled on a rotating mannequin hand. Each image gently fades in and out in either five or ten second clips, separated from the next by a moment of black.
All of the icons, including two brief clips from the old Jean Harlow film Bombshell, swirl around a dynamic of uncertainty, fragility, desire, nostalgia, and anticipation. As I point out in my statement, I am not interested in works of art whose meaning becomes calcified by either the artist's intentionality or a few scholars' reads of the work. Rather, I prefer to evoke dynamics that serve as open metaphors.
The dynamic here is one of bifurcation: a moment when a trajectory splits into two possible paths, and either of the outcomes is as likely as the other. These are the moments when "God plays dice" and life seems to be up to chance. The smallest input into the system is amplified ten-thousandfold.

In exhibiting this work, I have witnessed audience members internalize and identify this dynamic in their own lives. On several occasions, viewers have insisted Water Torture was about very personal events in their lives ranging from new romances to horrible breakups to attempts at starting a family.

Web video samples of this work are available in the video section, including a single screen mixdown of all five monitors. If you are a curator or collector and would like to see full quality video clips, please feel free to contact me.

This work was first exhibited at NFA Space in Chicago, Illinois in 2000. It has shown several times since then, most recently as a part of the 2003 Ann Arbor Film Festival's exhibition of media installation work.