Elliott Larson-Gillmore

Passing Through the Barrier

A floor projection with surround sound extends a possible world below the streets as it passes through various drainage systems and access points revealing signs of life that have slipped through the cracks. Their insides are explored without limitations. The idea of worlding motivated this return to drainage systems as connectors between bodies and spaces like in Cow Palace Field (2016; revised 2020)

“An extending-downward world of deepening immersion and submersion beneath the grounded real. A large pore upon the concrete world-floor, carved out, a vessel, shaft, vault, access-point, “manhole”, alternatively: utility-hole, maintenance-opening, inspection-chamber, access-chamber, or sewer-hole. Covered by thick metal grates with slits or openings; gateways, the affordance of passage-through into a void. The surface of the world, this flooring, is shown to be permeable, rather than solid. To permeate the surface of the world floor and see a pool of vague material dripping and stagnating, reverberating, marinating and emanating; glossy liquids, oils, salts, wastes, dirts, films, gasolines, alkoids, items like packets, wrappers, plastics, chips of things, stones, hairs, dusts, molds and buildups. A proximity and detail unready-to-hand, without reach, submerged, suppressed, hidden from our walking-world where flatnesses are taken with ease. Within the conduitial, vessular, cardiac, channeling passages of immersion, what primordial soup is revealed to be lurking beneath the surface, with all its collecting and evidencing materials, reflecting use and bodies. Materials “slipped through the cracks”, left to being below. The contents of the sub-merged world reveal uncanny things, of product encasements, bodily conditions, fecal and urinious material, salivary froth and bubbles—aspects of the body within the outer, the ulterior, within the subject object soup, in milieu beneath. A reflection in the removed, distanced, sunken, unspoken cesspool—always there, always channeling, always flowing and collecting, assembling and worlding passages. The work destabilizes the notion of firm boundaries or borders, perimeters, and limits—extending and deepening a notion of world, and in effect, bringing up the remnants, artifacts, aspects of the body that exist within invisible worlds.”