5 Words 2007

Anita Dube
India: New Installations, Part II, September 7, 2007 – January 20, 2008
Materials
steel, plastic mesh, found objects, drywall, paraffin wax, books, wood, salt, acrylic, PVC pipes, rope lights

The letters in W-A-S-T-E are containers covered in white mesh filled with white discarded materials and objects They are spaced on the floor so...

Description

The letters in W-A-S-T-E are containers covered in white mesh, filled with white discarded materials and objects. They are spaced on the floor so that the viewer can walk around them. W-O-M-A-N is spelled with 2’ high by 10’ long white candle letters. W-O-U-N-D is cut through drywall. A white bench contains plexiglass filled with salt and books that spell out W-I-S-D-O-M. The word W-A-R is spelled with rope light letters that can be seen hanging out the window to the right of the elevator.

Artist Statement

I wanted to work with one letter and kept writing strings of words. I could have ended up with the letter, “c” or “t” or anything but eventually I picked “w”, I thought I could deal with the issues, I was interested in through these words at this time. Everything is white because I didn’t want colors to interfere with the conceptual process. I wanted to make something compelling. I could have portrayed waste as a messy, repelling thing but I wanted the experience to be subtle where it unfolds and takes more time to understand. I think that attention spans are too short these days and artists need to have strategies to compete or combat this. I am also interested in how a word can become architecture, exploring that idea. Where I come from in India, we save everything, everything is re-used. The logic of capitalism is to have more, to have excess and therefore also to create more waste.

About the Artist

Anita Dube is trained as an art historian and critic. Her work is determinedly individualized yet provocatively informed by its cultural context. She has developed an aesthetic language that is partial to sculptural fragment as a cultural bearer of personal and social histories. Usually employing a variety of found objects, Dube explores a divergent range of subjects that address a profound concern for loss and regeneration- both autobiographical and societal.