David McQueen's profile

The unsaid everything

"One of us must have been sleeping, so I'll tell you again tonight." or "The unsaid everything" is an interactive public installation at Socrates Sculpture Park in conjunction with their annual Emerging Artist Fellowship Program. For this exhibition, David McQueen has recreated the lantern room of the Blackwell Beacon (situated directly across the river on Roosevelt Island). This beacon, however, is more ghost than lodestar and appears to have collapsed onto the shores of the park. It is a sad tribute to the beacon it seems to gaze upon, which is itself a vestigial monument to a more analog moment in our industrial history. Indeed, with the prevalence of GPS navigation, lighthouses have become largely decorative, and rarely used for their intended purpose. With this in mind, McQueen has assigned a different function to the collapsed lantern room on the shores of the East River. Prompting viewers to text the lighthouse (718.473.9985), the sculpture receives and then translates the message into Morse Code. At sunset, it begins broadcasting to its still-standing sister and to the world at large. In this way, the lantern room/lighthouse/lover allows us to say all of the things we left unsaid. This ghost of a lighthouse lets us speak to our own ghosts. Blackwell's Beacon remains dark and silent, most probably ignorant of the apologies, eulogies, whispers, and rumors that flash across the river… but there is a chance that it sees… and that chance dispels the regret and releases us to pursue the future.
The unsaid everything
Published:

The unsaid everything

"One of us must have been sleeping, so I'll tell you again tonight." or "the unsaid everything" is an interactive public installation at Socrates Read More

Published:

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