Fluid

copper, mirror

approx 4.5ft x 16ft

2020 

Fluid is a permanent copper and mirror installation at the Music Box Village venue in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

In the state of Louisiana building permits for public bathrooms are less expensive if the bathrooms are binary, if they are marked by designated gender. The Music Box venue has a shoestring budget and they decided to mark the exterior doors with a simple W and M. The public, especially at this venue, is not binary. I was dismayed by the division, it seems jarring for the location. The open space between the two wings brings community back into the design.

My vision was to play with that space, to extend it, to highlight the question of where we are in space. My intent was fluidity, multiplicity, movement, to build a shape that compelled the viewer from side to side, to forget the binary, to blur the lines of why they were in the space to begin with. 

The frames I hung above the sink contain flat mirror for the first two panes closest to the stalls, then the copper and mirror form rises up and passes through open panes, so that bathroom goers see themselves, see people on the other side, see fragments of themselves and the room over the others, then interact with others by putting their hands under the same streams of water. The mirror form rises and flows out the exterior door, around the post between the two doors, back in the other door so that is a whole organism existing in both spaces, in one space.