Bearing the Burden

                                         1st production run

                    Sky Saw                       Control Tower              Sky Stitcher

Cutting a hole in the sky

FFaith in Industry is a site-specific sculptural installation designed to produce psychic unity using commuters as raw materials. It is an effort to present an analogy for the status of our society with regard to the co-existence of and inter-relationship between the two most powerful conceptual forces in the history of human culture, God and Capitalism, as they exert themselves on our nationalistic tendencies. The piece calls into question the nature of faith, power, value systems and systems of belief. It seeks to communicate and generate a plethora of ideas, and to inject those ideas directly into the primary instrument of the formation of the American diaspora, the highway system, i.e., the mechanical river. Faith in Industry consists of three formal structures: The Sky Saw, The Control Tower, and The Sky Stitcher, and a ritual performance.
The Sky Saw is designed to cut a hole in the sky creating a psychic opening thereby giving access to the other side of consciousness and allowing for psychic unity to occur. The Control Tower is used to harvest errant souls from chaos as they are lost in transit during the mundane ritual of the daily commute, and send them through the hole in the sky where psychic unity occurs or to the hole in the ground where they mop floors and study yin-yang until they are ready for personal spiritualism at some future time. The Sky Stitcher is designed to sew up holes in the sky when openings appear that may be detrimental to humanity as a whole, such as the fundamentalist hole and the unbridled capitalist hole which seek to inflict their paradigm upon anything under their vacuum.
During the Faith in Industry ritual performance, I work the complex while commuter traffic backs up bumper-to-bumper in front of the house. The job consists of “bearing the burden” through chaos on an ascent to the shining city on the hill where a “consecration of commuters” takes place. Then operation of all towers can proceed, interspersed with coffee breaks.
This trinity of works seeks to solve all possible problems related to the great unknown. If one is seeking psychic unity, the Sky Saw can provide the opening for such an experience. If a psychic opening is causing turmoil, it can be closed up with the Sky Stitcher. If there is no interest in the other side of consciousness, then a stint in the Control Tower should provide a sense of secular power, renewing that element of control necessary to psychological balance.