Sunday, August 12, 2012

Bed Written

by Drew Martin
After a long run this morning, I ate a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, took a shower and fell into a deep sleep for a couple hours. When I awoke, I could not move. I was so heavy. It felt like my veins were filled with lead and that gravity had me pinned to the bed. So I thought about what I would look like from the ceiling and then I remembered an installation I did in college. The sculpture department had an abandoned house off campus for projects. I had a large room and a closet. For the main room, I cut out a slightly smaller footprint of the dry grass land outside the window and brought it into the space; like a carpet with a view of its source - not very interesting. The closet piece, however, is something that worked really well. I had a girlfriend from a rare and fleeting relationship take a picture of me lying naked in some kind of fetal position on a black roof below her window. I took that image (slide film) and projected it from the ceiling of the closet, down on a pile of sifting sugar in the small dark space. The projection of me was quite tiny, probably only six inches tall. It was interesting because the projected body changed shape with the way the sugar amassed, and the viewers were also moving the sugar around to contort the shape and were cupping mini-me in their hands.