Happy Together
A Collaboration with Ky Sattler
Wood, Aluminum
61 x 104 in. (155x264 cm)- Height Variable
2022

“That the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts). Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the "unreal." exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.”

Roland Barthes

Happy Together - a title borrowed from the Wong Kar Wai movie(1997) - takes the form of two ceiling fans joined together by their blades. It’s forms rendered inoperable/non-functioning via their union. Immobilized and sedentary, the work is a meditation on dysfunction. Open to interpretation, the piece speaks about the turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive love, break up, make up, and falling apart again and again. Happy Together explores love as a space that can be both inviting and potentially paralyzing; as a way to explore how games and play can be understood as tools that deconstruct, replicate, or transform the physical/metaphysical space. How it can become a war of an extreme solitude. One in which the eeriness of the everyday and the slowing of time becomes apparent.

Photography:
Alison Postma