Columbia, Missouri, USA

The String in the Labyrinth: Part I

The String in the Labyrinth is a two-part collaborative work. Part I appeared in the University of Missouri’s Memorial Union between April 17, 2023 and April 20, 2023, alongside works by Reese Betts, Jillian Hawk, Meaghan Fleming, Sophie Stevens, and Felix Wang. The installation was created with the aid of Katina Bitsicas and the University of Missouri’s 2022-2023 ASH Research Program.

The String in the Labyrinth

The String in the Labyrinth invites viewers to find their most accessible method of processing grief. Western culture encourages grieving privately and in isolation. As a public exhibition, The String in the Labyrinth is structured for group viewing. This normalizes a communal grieving process and allows viewers to maintain their preferred level of privacy while promoting collective vulnerability. The visual presence of the artworks removes the barrier of intangibility from grief and eases the viewer into processing their own grief.

The exhibition spans Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), projected video, multimedia sculpture, and motion sensor interactivity, to explore a kaleidoscope of ways in which the living process death. Each of the included works has a different approach to interaction, allowing viewers to control their level of involvement.

Digital abstractions, such as those seen in the projected video work, Entropy of a Memory, explore memory loss and subjective interpretations of the past. Also digital, Primordial Grief is an interactive projection that allows audience members to make a physical impact on the art, mimicking how grief transforms individuals over the course of their lives.

In Skeletons in the Closet, the physicality of sculptural media delves into hands-on interactivity and provides viewers an opportunity to hand-write and share feelings about death and loss. Digital Reliquary combines physical and AR artifacts of death into a multimedia reliquary, confronting how mourning historically transforms bodies into relics. These works combine to elevate and subvert viewer perception and expectations regarding grief.

Presenting the pieces in a unified space creates a collection of interpretations of grief from a variety of perspectives, and establishes a sense of shared lived experiences.