FALLING WATER 2007

Site-Specific Installation: Elsewhere, Greensboro NC
Spray-Painted Signs, Painted Paper, Building, Rain, View

While looking at plywood shuttered windows on the 3rd floor...looking out to the sky and alley, the words "falling water" came to mind.

On a boarded window next to them was spray-painted "absolutely no smoking" in stenciled letters. I thought of directives and signs...a poetic response to the potential for rain. (Letting the elements come in and the inevitability thereof). An old building with makeshift blinders to the outside.

From the alley below, looking up, the plywood shutters open and flap in the wind. If you look to your left or right, you see objects casually strewn about, old bricks, trash-- framed by other warehouse buildings and green in between. Two dogs bark and guard the fence among the weeds.

"Fallingwater" is a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pennsylvania. Its structure incorporates the water of the falls, while being cantilevered above. Windows look out and over the falling water, thereby, pronouncing visual and metaphysical harmony between the built and natural environment.

I began to think of falling water in reflexive terms: looking out, looking in, the relation of a structure to its site, and the possibility of framing a building in relation to a well-known work such as "Fallingwater" proper.

Signage as a signifier, words as signifiers, the ability of "titling" to illicit meaning.

The relationship between construction, a constructed response, individual interpretation, and that, which cannot be controlled-- such as the rain.

Without knowing, my signs and installation produced a rain shower immediately thereafter.
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Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater

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