VOLUME COMPRESSED AND EXPANDED

City Site, San Francisco, California 1999

A collaboration with Sheila Ghidini.
The work consists of two parts:
Compressed – in the City Site lot, across from City Hall, three large archways are constructed from massive bales of crushed cans on their way to be recycled. (The bales were on loan from Norcal, the local recycling depot, who assisted in the installing. Ironically, the bales were slowly pried apart and the cans sold back to the recycling plant by the local homeless population.)
Expanded – In the adjacent Grove Street Windows, over the course of several sittings we sit and crumple pages from stacks of junk mail and toss each item into a pile that slowly fills the space. As we work, we read out random text from the printed material, projected onto the street through loudspeakers.

The work was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, California.