Abstract:
ABSTRACT
Sift . . .Shift
by
Belinda D’Arcy Hanson
Master of Fine Arts in Art
California State University, Chico
Spring 2011
Sift . . . Shift is a one-person mult-media installation, incorporating sound,
video and sculpture, displayed in the University Art Gallery, Taylor Hall, at California
State University, Chico. The viewer enters the space on a large deck, which leads to a
false partition shingled with myriads of overlapping pillows sheathed in white slips. Gentle
sounds of nighttime crickets fill the space and serve to bind the individual, assemblage
sculptures, into a world of sound and memory. There are six individual sculptural elements,
Red Rover, Listening Table, Gate Keeper, Sift . . .Shift, Last Dance, and Night
Sounds, which act as “chapters” in the story of this installation.
The divided room in Sift . . . Shift functions as metaphor on different levels.
First it functions metaphorically as memory. The part we can access is just the tip of the
glacier—the largest part, the memory we cannot recall— lies below the surface, or in this
installation, behind the pillowed wall.
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The divided room also functions as metaphor for time and how through Einstein’s
predicted wormholes two moments in time, though vastly separated, are actually
simultaneous. This suggests that through a wormhole, youth and age, are simultaneous.
Finally Sift . . . Shift is an ode to a generation of people we are losing, and to
their memories which we will lose with them: a generation who grew up on a farm,
fought a World War, and believed in the American Dream.
