It Will All Disappear
It Will All Disappear is an exhibition in collaboration with Dr. Renzo Vitale, which includes a collection of LED duratrans light boxes featuring images from the durational performance ‘Tell Me Your Secrets’ 2014. This installation view was commissioned by Le Poisson Rouge in New York City, 2016.
We live each moment on the precipice of becoming a new person. Only he who grants himself permission to bravely excoriate himself, can excite one’s power to imagine and reinvent oneself, provoking questions of who we must resign in ourselves in order that a new person may come into being. This existential inquiry is at the heart of the latest Taxiplasm experience.
The images displayed document the artist’s month-long multimedia performance, “Tell Me Your Secrets” in collaboration with artist and musician Renzo Vitale, part of Art Production Fund’s Artist is Residence program at the P3 Studio inside The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, co-produced by Contaminate, in September 2014. Throughout the residency, individual audience members were invited to share their untold tales both dark and bright, as both artists surrendered themselves for five hours a day, five days a week, inside a pair of pyramid pod sculptures, each lined with LED lights and an interior of broken mirrors, with Gonzalez and Vitale each photographing the other’s performance.
Through a complex algorithm, the audience’s voice merges with others, each day additively expanding into an evolving musical score comprised of a vast ocean of voices. Each vocal expression is simultaneously filtered through the sculptures, catalyzing a malleable fluid that reconstructs the performer’s newfound physical makeup, sculpted by the vulnerable vibration of each audience member’s voice. Thus, a new reflection is forged each day. It is an image of a secret humanity long lost in its volatile quest for meaning, newly aware that there is no reason to mask an emotion we all share.
Now, the Taxiplasm experience expands from that residency, culminating these images of anguish for the first time into a mystifying transformation of the human spirit that assimilates our wounds as the beacons of our experience, pointing us to what we truly value and reveal the person hiding behind our many walls and beneath our many mirrors. To achieve this heightened sensibility, Gonzalez decided to fabricate each image as an LED light box so that it may illuminate in the darkness, thereby allowing each piece to become a place which stirs that which is unsettling, to embolden our fragility, strengthening our understanding of what it means to be human, and to be able to know the miraculous weight of an emotion.
At the center of this mortal interrogation, lies a sarcophagus for an absent body, (in collaboration with artists Miguel Ovalle, aka Dizmology, and Nicholas Papadakis). The piece commemorates the person we are in this moment and reverently laying to rest the pain that has sculpted our spirit so that we may empower ourselves to be in a state of infinite rebirth.
Thus, a new kind of question bears itself: Who is the person underneath the anguish we wish to expel?
Who is the person free from conditioned habits and fears?
Who is the person we are responsible to become with our time, knowing it will all Disappear?
Such inquiry cannot be solved, it is a thunderous storm that can only be penetrated, lived in, experienced from beginning to inevitable end, he, to himself, for his own.