Delay is a spare installation about impossible love. It is meant to be a lure: to be seen, heard and experienced; to delay people, as love does – which, in this case, stems from my love of painting and the goal to take it from its 20th century’s expansion into space into the realm of time with sound. Various ways of understanding paintings as artefacts contribute to privileging the eye over the ear and, arguably, the diminishing sense of touch. In other words, all these view painting as a direct, visual experience as opposed to something that unfolds over time, for which the ear is better suited.
Delay treats painting as an embodiment of process. The arrangement of colors and shapes, the enjoyment of visually surfing along a painting’s surface incidents and not being able to touch them, instantaneously creates desire. And that desire is compounded by a tickling of the ear, the sense that complements the eye in our experience of time and space. And it is this tease—this suggestion and refusal to be explicit—that captivates its viewers: A painting alerts multiple senses, and we are delayed.
Created in collaboration with Florian Grond, Delay purposely references Marcel Duchamp’s interest in visuals and sound and The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even), which he originally titled Delay and which also dealt with impossible love.
- Mary Sherman, 2015
Delay is presented by OBORO as a prelude to the upcoming retrospective project Dream Mechanics curated by Tamar Tembeck, in the Fall of 2016.