Patrice Caire P. O. Box 60 - Prince Street Station - New York, NY 10012-0001 Voice Mail: 212/677-6121 - E-Mail: caire@maya.cs.nyu.edu
Crash!, the Brooklyn Museum's thirty-fourth installation in a series of Grand Lobby projects. Incorporating three-dimensional elements made mostly of synthetic materials and metal--vinyl, acrylics, rubber, aluminum, and steel--with computer animation and electronics, Caire's installation generates an optically radiant environment that intertwines modern technology and aesthetics. Applying scientific research tools such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a medical diagnostic technique, as models and simultaneously translating these scientific methods and information into visual forms, she creates the setting of an abstract configuration. With geometric and organic sculptural forms dispersed across the floor, wall, and ceiling of the Grand Lobby, as well as the use of vivid colors, holograms, and film and sound effects, this dynamic environment activates the senses, stimulates observation, and encourages the immediate involvement of the viewer. Thus, at the core of Caire's installation is a pure experience, perceptual and empirical as well as intellectual and contemplative.
Interested in art as an investigation or research into both sensual and conceptual experience, Caire merges human and technological, public and private, and control and freedom in her work. Furthermore, she challenges the structural ground of language and knowledge, setting up an interplay between the acronyms based on her surname and used as titles, and various literary quotes incorporated within the installation. Through the use of these acronyms, the artist erases her personal identity, and with the inclusion of fragments of text taken from literature and philosophy, she creates, in her words, a "cultural landscape," a vast spectrum of social implications. Caire's artwork operates as a network of interconnections between art, science, and linguistics, transporting the individual out of the confines of museums or galleries into a zone of multisensorial art, cross-referential meaning, and high-tech fabrication.