Tabula Non Grata

Tabula Non Grata is a multimedia sculptural installation centered on a whitewashed ruin, an unsettling amalgam of an architectural façade and the fractured shell of a human torso. Buttressed into an abandoned formation of body and habitat, the structure occupies an island-like position within a surrounding field of video imagery. As viewers move around the installation, the distinction between figure and dwelling becomes increasingly uncertain. What appears to be the remains of a building also suggests a wounded body, while the moving image traces a perimeter around a presence it cannot fully disclose.

The title combines tabula rasa, the blank slate, with persona non grata, the unwelcome person. Together they suggest a peculiar condition in which the erasure of an object from established schemes of recognition is mistaken for its disappearance. The ruin persists, even as its visible remnants offer only a partial account of what has been lost or displaced.

The work takes its conceptual departure from Arthur Eddington's famous parable of the two tables: the familiar table of everyday experience and the same table described by physics, largely as space populated by subatomic particles. Graham Harman subsequently proposed a third table, an object whose reality cannot be exhausted by either its appearance to human observers or the explanations supplied by scientific knowledge. This third term proposes an existence exceeding the conditions through which an object becomes accessible or intelligible.

Tabula Non Grata gives this philosophical proposition an unsettling material presence. The fractured structure and its encircling imagery establish a relationship between what can be represented and what continues to subsist beyond representation. Yet the work also introduces a more disturbing implication. Its battered architecture and bodily fragmentation evoke a place violently dismantled and subsequently forsaken, its existence relegated to the margins of a world order that determines what may be acknowledged and what must remain excluded. The abandoned place has been shelled to smithereens. What remains is a vestigial centerpiece, skirted by reflections of its ostensible parts, like an islet whose submerged mass remains beyond reach. At the same time, its demonstrable presence obscures a shunned reality, one denied recognition yet still subsisting even as its vital signs recede from perception.

Multi-Media Sculpture

Wood, plaster, video monitor, and looping media

36" wide x 26" deep x 56" high