Moving Bodies, Embodied Walls
by Andrew Sargus Klein
In a room damp with early summer humidity, the soloist’s slow pace approached a breaking point. Prone in the center of the floor, all torso, mantis-like, isolated limbs slowly unfolded, reached, paused. No air circulation, no score, a thin sheen of sweat over everyone, save for the soloist who captivated the audience as first one limb, then two, then all left the ground in a suspended geometry.
We were watching a kinetic sculpture compiled of wood slats, a piece of bannister, some pocket shutter, a chair leg, shoe molding, several varieties of hinge, and eye hooks. The creation was manipulated by two sets of hands holding black cord that ran through squeaking pulleys and connected to the eye hooks.
It was part sculpture, part puppet, part voice—the wood and metal breathed as if it were its own body. It transformed static materials beyond the mere connectibility of their individual parts, and it was a near-perfect culimination of a performance focused on the “human experience in relation to architecture” which questioned “concepts of stability.”
Moving Walls, set in the first two floors of the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture, was a collaborative and site-specific effort in the truest sense of those terms. Five artists came together in an almost year-long generative process: Sidney Pink (movement), Noa Heyne (filmography and sculpture), Sarah Smith (movement), Matthew Williams (movement), and Khristian Weeks (score).
