Jackson McGrath
NYC
August 1 - 31, 2019
Sponsored by Clydette and Charles de Groot in partnership with O, Miami
Artist Statement
…
ELI: Nothing outside my window ever really changes. The view, of the tops of buildings, antennas, bricks, ac units, windows, is immutable and fixed, gridded into inertia. The things that do change are small and unspectacular. A window that was closed earlier will now be open, though you won’t have seen it happen, as if the apartment was a tiny stage rearranged by stagehands between the acts. The performance began just after you left and ended just before you entered, leaving you with only this evidence: a lit lamp, drawn curtains, the room-filling flicker of a television at dark. The actors themselves rarely, if ever, take to the stage; their presence is felt through their effect on the windows alone. Only once did I witness the full performance, and even then the woman was only stepping out to draw the blinds of her bedroom window.
My window is a window too, and surely evidentiary of my existence to others in the same way theirs are to me. I stupidly broke the draw string of the blinds a long time ago, and so can no longer close them. The buildings across the way and the sky and the tops of the trees—this image, a living photograph hung on the wall where a window should be—is as integral to the apartment now as its own walls and floors and furnishings.