In a previous version of Steam, the installation found it’s own context in the eccentricities
of the space, which featured a number of architectural anomalies. Presently, in the pristine
Projects Space of Gallery Diet, a different work has emerged. Without the oddities of its
first venue, the piece has formed its own dance against right angles, black walls and white floor.

The Suessian plant life of Miami can also be counted as an influence. What else is an artist
in a single week residency in a city mostly unknown to him going to respond to but the
natural surroundings? Especially this artist, who is at times more interested in what goes
on under the stars than beneath the umbrella of contemporary culture.

The thirty components that combine here are derived from hundreds of bicycle parts
picked up daily for three weeks in Amsterdam, the city of 1.5 million bicycles. On an
Artpace travel grant for just this purpose, the artist recorded ambient sounds as
he walked every street within the fan shaped area bordered by the Singelgracht.
These dual activities, simultaneously purposeful and random, can be favorably
compared to the Baudelarian theory of Flâneur, a type of urban strolling characterized
by attention but not by intention.

This meandering method also came in to play in the way the work gradually assembled
itself over several days, almost without the hand of the artist, as if in a tale of toys that
come to life while the toyshop is closed. This faux absence replicates the original
activities --- the artist wandered the city with a pair of mics concealed in headphones
while looking only at the ground, earnestly involved, but not seeing or hearing the actual
surroundings.

The selected parts are represented in profile by wooden templates mounted with photographs
of sampled sky laminated to Plexiglas.  A sound montage created by layering and
looping the gathered audio material accompanies the visual installation, connecting
both in a new circumstance. The sounds, formerly experienced once and then left
behind, form a topography which can be revisited, becoming increasingly familiar,
while the blue-gray bits of atmosphere, captured by the camera and viewed through a
lens of human refuse, point to a similarly random scenario which eventually finds
its own systemic order.

Something strange occurred in the final day of installation. The images formed
by the placement of the parts began to resemble 3000 year old stone reliefs seen and
felt by the artist on two recent trips to Chavín de Huántar in the Peruvian north
highlands. This wholly unconscious outcome was exactly what the new context was asking
for --- a sense of completion mitigated by the promise of continued mutation.