No title, or Conditions of Engagement is a large, white, hollow wall whose closed-off interior is available only through a video feed on a personal phone.

“The viewer inadvertently begins to fill the hollow space with their own projections: ideas about the artist, about the piece, about the world, and about the role of art within it.”

No Title is developed around the container or ‘black-box’ structure. It belongs to a series of works in which the epistemological problem of a surface is instantiated literally: where the object contains an imaginary secret activated by clues accessible to the viewer from the outside.

The piece consists of a large, white, hollow wall structure – about sixteen feet in length and one and a half foot in width. The wall is entirely enclosed on all sides presenting a white-painted hardboard surface to the viewer, perceptibly-thin and sonorous – small knocks producing an echo and emphasizing the hollow inside. The wall is adorned by a small, vaguely historicist shelf which displays the artist’s phone transmitting a view of the interior space of the wall. Inside, as the video suggests, is a luscious still life. Vases and plates carrying fruit, vegetables, and meats, are bunched up in the interior narrow of the structure and illuminated by candles. Two prominent wine glasses in the foreground entice the viewer to join.

The object is moot. The epistemological pretext for its existence (“whether the still-life is inside or not”) quickly discharges with no apparent payoff. The prompt may even seem vulgar. The particular details of the object, its proportions, whiteness, texture, volume, modulate but do not resolve the intention around what, quite literally, is an unconsumed meal of the piece.

The viewer inadvertently begins to fill the hollow space with their own projections: ideas about the artist, about the piece, about the world, and about the role of art within it. Just as the wall is a membrane between the inside and outside, the piece becomes a membrane between the artist and the viewer, or even between the viewer and the institution. The audience is left with their own expectations to examine in the course of what nonetheless feels like a dialogue. To me No Title elaborates the paradoxical, excessive possibilities of negative space: Reticence produces generosity. Intimacy is a result of a push-and-pull.