Spoken For

A site specific commission located in Washington DC, 'Spoken For' employs text fragments selected from across the city for their capacity to suggest a meaning other than the author's original intention. A fish market stall proudly boasts that ‘Our Crabs Have No Sand' and a derelict shop bears the peeling legend ‘Rescue Workers', but divorced from their context and placed into the shadow of the Washington Monument these disposable snippets of text assume new meanings more reminiscent of protest and political activism. Notions of the model (prototype - pattern - sample - example - exemplar - specimen - a translation of something yet to become...) and the souvenir (memento, keepsake, mnemonic, fetish - a translation of something past) are of particular interest...perhaps because these forms hold at their core a very human sense of longing for an ideal state.