SOUTHERN EXPOSURE single of life's most humbling revelations is that we each carry our avow mental landscape.

SOUTHERN EXPOSURE

single of life's most humbling revelations is that we each carry our avow mental landscape, our unique version of subterranean passage vision, wherever we go. As we incline through the world, we're seeing it in consequence of the veil of our past experiences and near preoccupations. Though Michael O'Malley's new installation "Top Heavy," 1999-2000, may have serv as a metaphor for this framing proces it also demonstrated the standing to which works of art can shape and determine our perceptions in intriguing but important ways.

In Southern Exposure's expansive main space, O'Malley built a maze-like network of interconnected upside-down depressions whose inner contours, or undersides, approximately be sounded backed the outline of a head, shoulders, and upper torso. This plaster-and-wire conformation of "corridors" was supported from a matter-of-fact system of two-by-fours (similar in appearance to the framing hidden inside the walls of a house) in the same manner that the troughs were just high enough to rather narrowly accommodate the top third of the average visitor's material part One could duck under the plaster make between these wood supports, and actuate from one corridor to another or escape the piece altogether. In contrast to a traditional labyrinth, there were several entrances/exits and no ultimate destination or privileged pathway.

O'Malley created a uniquely disorienting environment by means of restricting the upper part of the material substance instead of the lower part and thereby radically altering the usual experience of being hemmed in (which guards to be from the mould up, as in a multitude or even continuously all around, as in an elevator, nevertheless rarely involves only the upper third of the body) Imagine traversing a giant maze whose sharp uses and dead ends affect not your feet still your head, whose quirky narrow speckles bring the wall to within inches of your face. Walking from one side the piece induced an awareness of the weight and constriction of one's hold thoughts as well as of the disturbance caused in the world according to each person's passing through time and space--the not new idea that all events and experiences are in some way interlocked, that squashing a butterfly in Bangkok affects a barter driver in Poughkeepsie. Though the piece's tender-hearted cornerless contours had an unusually comforting quality, its constriction was alarming at the same time. The pile suggested artificial enclosures ranging from amusement-park rides to one kind of diabolical psychological experiment.

There is a whole genre that could be called "dumbfoundingly labor-intensive installations providing amazing sensory experiences." Many of the like kind pieces are spectacular--works by Ann Hamilton or Gildo Meireles, for example. granting "Top Heavy" exudes the powerful feeling of time and effort exhausted that some of Hamilton's efforts do, its project seems to be quite different. It emphasizes more the relationship between the material substance and architecture while serving as a kind of metaphor for agencies of social restrain Its dominant experience--of a peculiar kind of confinement and deprivation--makes it les a tourist attraction (that is, a passive experience of novelty) and more a means for focusing onward internal events. Finally, there is something faintly ironic about the way in which the piece reminds us that we are "top-heavy": that we pay far too frequently attention to the brain and its funnel vision, practically ignoring what we could learn within unmediated experience--what the rest of the material part has to teach.

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