PROJECTS 2001: Jim Drain

   

MIRROR PIECE (PLATH)

October 2001


For "Mirror Piece (Plath)," a line from Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song, is etched onto a 8" diameter mirror that is hung on the wall behind the shower. The excerpted lines are brutal and comforting and they cannot be understood. In some ways they function as if they are a different language in that Plath asks for a question that would be and would have been impossible to both answer and comprehend.

 
     

For the 667 Shotwell.com launch party and opening show in September, Jim Drain sent a fax to be pinned up on the wall behind the shower in the bathroom as a precursor to his installation piece in October. Both pieces in their own way deal with impossibilities.

The Fax was a copy from the book, "Love to All, Jim" which is a compilation of letters sent by a Vietnam soldier home to his stateside family. The passage is strange. The soldier's letter expresses his compassion for the same people he is ordered to disenfranchise in Vietnam. One moment he is making a toy raft for children, awaiting orders. The next moment he is following those received orders that instruct him to destroy that same family's home. It does not make any sense. The soldier's personal and emotional sense of morality is overruled.

 
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Mailing Package for the Mirror
   
       
Jim Drain is an artist formerly of Providence, Rhode Island were he graduated with a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and now based in Miami, FL. Jim is a resident of the ephemereal and decentralized Fort Thunder and is an active member of the collective Forcefield which recently had a two month show titled "Forcefield" at Parlour Projects in Brooklyn this past summer. He likes autumn leaves and hot cider after strolling through a neighborhood full of lit jack-o-lanterns and is starting a company called Happy Banana with his two new roomies.