Hotel Vertigo, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 2015
Exhibition Catalogue (excerpts)
For the Hotel Vertigo installation, I assume the role of a production designer for a fictitious film set in Southeast Asia and inspired by the novels of W.G. Sebald. I have repurposed selected paintings, sculptures and architectural models to suggest the tone of the imagined film, its characters, locations and props. The book at the center of the installation comprises text from Sebald’s novels paired with photographs of furniture and architecture. A description of a character lying in bed, seated at a table, entering a room or walking down a street is accompanied by a selection of images of beds, chairs, tables, rooms or streetscapes. The production designer of the imagined film would present this information to the director who would then choose from among the options the particular piece of furniture, the room or the exterior to be used in the film. The images are culled from my archive of approximately 5000 photographs taken over a period of thirty years in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Italy, France and the United States.