A Fancy Machine is the Perfect Centerpiece, 2013
An installation only visible through an eyehole in a locked door at Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC, 2013
During a six-month residency in Basel, Switzerland, Travis LeRoy Southworth spent much of his time investigating the Large Hadron Collider run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Having completed the residency, he approached Projective City with a proposal for his most ambitious project to date. Inspired by the power of the CERN particle detectors to produce tens of petabytes of data per year, Southworth believed it possible to produce a slightly smaller scale, Do-It-Yourself version of the hadron collider, to enable his own experiments on the invisible particles that compose us. The project promised to further Southworth’s ongoing artistic investigations into the cosmic forces that continually mold us, and his presentation of the self in relation to the universe.
Nevertheless, even a smaller version promised to be much larger than his domestic arrangements could accommodate, and so he approached Projective City about using the large gallery space in Paris as a workshop in which to build his hi-tech machine. We were initially overjoyed by the possibility of bringing such a worthwhile scientific project into the context of an art gallery, but if we had known the extent of the project we might not have been so eager.
In order to install the bank of superconductive magnets, Southworth tore down much of the east wall while the gallery staff were visiting New York, initiating what will likely be protracted litigation between the building managers and the gallery. The gallery in Paris remains closed pending further legal action and is unavailable for French visitors. However, the ParisScope viewer was largely undamaged, and New Yorkers can still avail themselves of this unique opportunity to see the results of art and science colliding. Though this might mean the end of the Projective City gallery space in Paris, we feel Southworth’s accomplishment should be celebrated as best as possible under the circumstances, as it so clearly embodies the qualities of passionate inquiry, curiosity, and purity of heart we hope to foster.
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This is Mixed Greens’ tenth installment of Paris-Scope — a series of peculiar, collaborative exhibitions that give visitors to Mixed Greens a glimpse into French-based Projective City’s gallery space. The unique series provides a new possibility for the practice of exhibiting aesthetic experience, and allows artists unprecedented control over the gallery space. Through this alchemical experiment into the possibilities of “action at a distance,” the viewer is able to peer into (but obviously not enter) the space both thousands of miles away and inches from his or her nose — to mystically be both HERE and THERE simultaneously.