the measure of all things

the measure of all things takes Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man as its source — the Renaissance drawing of a single naked body inscribed inside a square and a circle. The square is ratio, the circle is nature; study and desire held in opposition, with the body at their meeting point. The geometry was meant to hold the body still. Five centuries later, the geometry comes apart.

At the center of the installation, a silk-printed flag — the white flag — hangs from a metal pole. The flag carries many bodies, an entire field of possible figures: those who could be measured, those who could be looked at, those who could be made into film. Seven of them have been. Seven small video monitors arrayed around the flag play seven loops, singularly, asynchronously, and simultaneously: the arrow, the time keeper, the sleeper, the swordsman, the traveler, the vessel, the photographer. Each is a body printed on silk and placed back into the element that will undo it. The waves take the photographer. The wind blows down the swordsman. The light moves across the sleeper. The bodies dissolve as they are watched.

Power and connection cables spill across the floor between the monitors — the human body expelled out of the man-made materials that were meant to contain it. The Renaissance figure that was supposed to hold inside one geometry now plays past itself in seven different rooms of attention, while nature takes each body apart and the flag holds the larger crowd still waiting to be brought into time. None of the seven can be the measure of anything; the flag suggests there are too many of them; the wind and water suggest the geometry was never going to hold. What remains is looking, a distance closing or opening, and at times, not knowing what it wants.