Artist's Statement for Installations

      The most recent pieces: Meme, Punctuation, Flag and Mice, Mittens and Coronation (2001) explore the inimical relationship between victim and oppressor.  Images of cat and mouse are used metaphorically to examine the complexity and richness of this dipole.  The video embedded in the eyes of the cats in Meme is taken from a surveillance video made of the tunnels beneath a psychiatric hospital. The psychic interiors of these felines belong to the tunnels, their bodies are constricted, and yet they dance in unison, driven by an external mimetic force.

       In Punctuation, the mice cover and render useless the symbol of the American flag.  They threaten the cat torsos which are wedged within restrictive furniture, punctuated by sewing pins. Here the traditional cat/mouse relationship is inverted.  In Flag and Mice, the rodents as victims fly across the American flag casting shadows in complementary colors, permanently undoing its color symbolism (rendering it a symbol of anti-freedom?). Mittens attempts to undo preconceptions of oppressor. Here the cats are restrained, and though in the majority and having consumed the mice, are possibly victims themselves.  The menacing two-thumbed mittens contain them.  Are these the clumsy thumbs of alchemy?  In Coronation the cat is reified by taxidermied mice in colorful skirts.  The setting is a grand piazza.  The mood is possibly celebratory, but the visage of the cat suggests otherwise. She has a tumor.  Are her subjects praising her or poisoning her? 

      Gen Y Teaparty is a fanciful projection of genetic engineering gone awry among the stuffed animal set. Some bears have no heads, others have two, still others have extra arms or legs. All of the elements of this installation are Rorshached and rendered useless. The  silverware is missing its functional ends, the handles having doubled in on themselves. The plates and cups are useless as well. Genetic code decorates the wallpaper, plaster white blood cells cascade across the floor and DNA strands form images of streamers on the party hats. 

      In They Learn from Us the wax gopher spins on a turntable embedded in a tree trunk. He guards an artillery of chocolate covered cherries which he attempts to fire upon the battalion of wax bunnies.  He is the oppressor and yet his efforts to destroy go unnoticed by the bunnies. They render him useless. He spins in place. His artillery melts.

Susan M. White