In a story by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a man who is seeking immortality is directed to a mysterious company that claims to be able to provide such a service. As he waits for someone to attend to him, for what seems an inordinate amount of time, he remarks several times on the curious appearance of the waiting room, filled as it is with several odd cubes with horizontal slits in their sides, in addition to some perfunctory reception-area furniture and magazines. Finally, his curiosity gets the better of his boredom. He approaches one of the cubes and bends down to peer into its small opening. The secret of immortality becomes clear as he discovers a pair of sorrowful eyes staring back at him.
This chilling story comes to mind when confronted with “Between Heaven and Hell,” a potent installation of sculpture and photogravure prints by John Calaway currently on view at Poissant Gallery. This small warehouse is large enough to allow each of the spare sculptures sufficient room to assert its individual presence while maintaining the conversation between them. At opposite ends of the L-shaped front room sit two large boxes made of oxidized steel, each with sizable apertures cut into their side or top panels.
Look into the aperture of the first box, Innertarium (all works 2001), and you find a light bulb shining through four steadily diminishing wire boxes, the smallest barely big enough to accommodate the bulb. As the implications of confinement begin to sink in, you become aware of a disturbing sound elsewhere in the room: loud, sometimes labored breathing. That would be Syphon, the cube at the other end of the room. The breathing sometimes catches, is interrupted — as if the sound alone weren’t eerie enough. When you look through this cube’s aperture, all you see is your shadow breaking the small square of light on the box’s floor. You become the inhabitant of the box — the breather — and simultaneously someone outside the box — theย what?
Between these two sculptures sits a third, Soulevator. It’s constructed of four doorjambs and their doors, painted white and attached at right angles to form a columnar cube with a scrim on top. Light shines down through the scrim, filling the narrow space with a soft radiance. One door is open, another ajar — two invitations to enter.
When you’re inside such a space, circumscribed by physical limitations and sensory confusion, your inclination — and only recourse — is to look up toward the light, toward the promise of release or illumination (assuming there’s a difference). Despite the confinement, Soulevator feels more expansive than the two sculptures you can enter through only your imagination.
The photogravure prints in the show complement these themes of entrapment and release. The most compelling is Pollero. Glowing, featureless figures are crowded into a space that looks like it might be a covered truck bed, but the lack of detail in the print is disorienting. Who are they? And how is it we can see them through the side of the truck? It turns out the print is from an infrared photograph of mexicanos being smuggled across the border, jammed in the back of a truck for who knows how long a journey. After the disorientation, knowing is almost a relief. Almost.
Other prints play directly off the sculptures. Soulevator is a series of wide-angle photos looking up from inside the subject sculpture. The arrangement of the photos recalls Warhol’s multiple silkscreens, but the repeated images put one in mind of tunnel-to-the-light near-death experiences. Syphon is a view of an interior wall of that piece, graffitied with chalk marks and punctuated with protrusions, presenting the viewer with a harsh vision that completes the psychological spookiness of its counterpart.
But the most impressive piece in the show is a sculpture in the back room of the gallery. The Pod is a tall gas canister with five nozzles branching off from its top. Each nozzle is attached to a long, snaky black tube. Each tube is connected to a gas mask. Each gas mask is mounted on the back of an oxidized chair. The masks face forward, so as to suggest someone sitting on the black vinyl strips that form the crosshatch seating. The room is filled with a loud, constant hissing, like gas escaping. It is a massively unsettling yet compelling piece, not least because of its scale. Every emotion the work evokes is unpleasant, except the compassion for the masked, absent presences forever linked to this apparatus.
The political implications of these sculptures and prints are obvious, especially in a state that sometimes seems to take glee in incarcerating its citizens, and in a country where, for too long, the solution to every social ill has been to lock up someone — anyone — and throw away the key.
Yet also implicit in Calaway’s work are social, familial, ideological and even metaphysical concerns. We all find our freedom within certain confines, within parameters that may shift from time to time, that may contract or expand but still remain relatively constant. When those parameters get so familiar as to become invisible, we forget that every human action or desire is circumscribed and that even immortality would be a kind of prison.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2001.