Improvised Installations (2014-2018)
Nowhere Room presents Witness
An installation by Stacia Yeapanis at The Stolbun Collection
March 6 - 31, 2017
Nowhere Room presents Witness, an evolving improvisational installation by Stacia Yeapanis at The Stolbun Collection. Throughout March, Yeapanis will fill The Stolbun Collection with an unnatural landscape using thousands of small elements, meticulously created through repetitive gestures. Each week the work will grow and morph as she arranges and rearranges the pieces. In addition to the artist’s changes, the curators and the owner of the space, Seth Stolbun, will have agency to manipulate the elements as they wish.
Like much of Yeapanis’ work, this installation is site-responsive. The Stolbun Collection is a small gallery tucked away on the 15th floor of a downtown Chicago office building and is only accessible to a small group of key holders. As such, this particular installation is built for viewers, not visitors. Unlike Yeapanis’ previous installations, which depend on bodily experience as a significant part of seeing, Witness highlights what’s lost when the body is not present. Witness combines constant accessibility with the limitations of a fixed, remote point of view—all via the internet. Viewers can watch the installation 24 hours a day via the live feed from the Nest camera starting March 6th.
Yeapanis consciously surrenders control by allowing the view to be entirely controlled by the curators and Stolbun, who will also make different 360 close-up views of the installation available each week. The circumstances of the exhibition highlight dual unidirectional perspectives: as Yeapanis witnesses and responds to the space, an unknown public witnesses her actions. At its core, the exhibition is an exercise in how we consume the world around us, questioning what it means to bear witness to an event, a space and the present moment.