An interactive parking garage found in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is explored through painting and sculpture, providing a platform for examining the fragmentary nature of how we experience spaces. The surfaces of the paintings and sculptures are touched with the same materials, using the same tools, and as a result, share a skin. The smaller model allows a viewpoint for assessing the overall structure, while the larger room-filling model, still a miniature, is experienced in sections as the viewer moves around its perimeter..
The smaller garage is roughly twenty inches long and displayed in a Plexiglas vitrine case. The larger garage measures 34 x 8 x 12 feet and takes up a majority of the exhibition space. In both sculptures, the schematic simplifications made necessary by digital rendering in the video game are alternatively shrunken or amplified. Curves in particular are pixilated in the game, and the act of recreating these odd broken edges is emphasized in the sculpture.
Elevation was also inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ tale of the maps so large it covers the territory it describes:
Of Exactitude in Science
…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
—From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda
The installation was exhibited in Philadelphia at Jenny Jaskey Gallery in September 2007.
In March 2008 Elevation was exhibited by Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York at Pier 40, as part of the PULSE Art Fair Special Projects.
*Materials used to construct sculpture include: MDF, plywood, hollow-core door panels, acrylic, enamel, modeling paste, and marble dust.
Garage in Fog, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches, 2008
Model, MDF, basswood, acrylic, marble dust, and modeling paste, displayed in a plexiglas case, model dimensions: 5 x 12 x 20 inches, 2007
Large High Ground, oil on canvas, 72 x 96 inches, 2007
Small High Ground, oil on panel, 20 x 25 inches, 2007
I Can See For Miles, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches, 2007
Elevation, Installation at PULSE Art Fair Special Projects, March 2008
Running Man, oil on linen, 8 x 10 inches, 2007
Model with Public Art, Wood, polystyrene, acrylic, marble dust and modeling paste, 40 x 16 x 72 inches, 2008
Model with Public Art, detail
A Still Point, oil on linen, 48 x 58 inches, 2008
Still point, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches, 2009