Locus 1998

Description

Cuban-born, Henriquez examines the environment and place with Locus. The masked, detailed photographs of sites, objects, symbols, and close-ups of body parts function like views through windows and recollections of places and things. The shaped rubber arrangements on the floor create points for three viewers to interact in relation to each other with the correlating photographs on the walls. A narrative can be drawn from identifying with the images and giving form to the displaced images, images that no longer exist or are not temporally tied. This three-way communication completes the installation, playfully referring back to the human bodies that live through the experiences.

Henriquez had originally planned to make the shapes on the floor out of plywood but found that the old wooden floor of the building was too uneven for a rigid form. After exploring various replacement materials, like heavy felt and other flooring materials, the staff of the Mattress Factory and the artist discovered the heavy rubber materials at a Pittsburgh gasket manufacturer. She had intended to hand-cut all the pieces, but the manufacturer was able to die-cut them so that they are identical and fit together seamlessly. Henriquez used a blueprint machine to plot and scale one section of the triform from her original drawing. She did not decide on their final shape until after she had seen the space.