Airport In Security, November 16-19, 2012
Chashama 461 Gallery, 461 west 126th street (Amsterdam and Morningside Aves.), New York, NY 10027
Chashama 461 Gallery presents Airport In Security, a site-specific installation by Tirtzah Bassel. The installation, created in duct tape directly on the gallery walls, explores the airport as a contemporary symbol of transience and transition where strangers are challenged to contextualize their private needs within a space that is at once public and exposing.
Airport In Security investigates the tensions implicit in the competing uses and practices of airport spaces. The exhibition considers private interactions in the airport, including touch between strangers during security pat downs, and the tight organization of passengers through endless zip lines, as well as the litany of passengers engrossed in their smartphones, which suggests the nexus of personal exchange hosted by the airport’s cavernous waiting areas. Implicit in these encounters, the interactions between people and structure highlight the tension between intimacy and vulnerability, and between eroticism and abuse, that dictates airport culture.
Engaging the line between painting and sculpture, Bassel uses duct tape to create an exciting visual vocabulary, which probes the borders between public and private spheres, implicating the viewer in a relationship to the exhibition that is both as shared and as a personal as the airport spaces the installation considers.