PACE — Andrew Ellis Johnson

PACE, 2012, still

OVER THERE 2011

Archival digital print on Hahnemühle paper, 72” x 27”

OVER THERE responds to historical and contemporary notions of liberty--here and “over there,” especially in light of revolutionary movements during the Arab Spring of 2011. Connections between Egypt and America exist in the history of the Statue of Liberty, a noted symbol of freedom. Originally known as "Liberty Enlightening the World," the statue was proposed by the French historian Edouard de Laboulaye to commemorate the Franco-American alliance during the American Revolution. Its sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, began developing plans for a colossal female figure as a beacon, proposed to Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt. The plan was to build a huge lighthouse in the form of an ancient Egyptian female fellah or peasant, robed and holding a torch aloft, at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal in Port Said. The figure was based on Bartholdi’s 1856 drawings that used Egyptian women as models. The Egyptian beacon was never built, but the Statue of Liberty’s 1870-71 design evolved from this earlier version.

Informed by a photograph of the statue's display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in New York, the torch in “Over There” has slipped from Liberty’s hand. The torch is an instrument of human agency, so its fall or absence might ask how abstract and ideal notions of “freedom” become realities. Who truly bears the torch of freedom today and how is liberty won?

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OVER THERE was included in Sites of Passage: Egypt and the U.S. at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh in September of 2011.

OVER THERE 2011

Detail from Liberty’s hand.

PACE 2012, HD Video, 2:25 loop

Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick, HD Video, 5:38 loop

To view video, click here.

In PACE, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Washington Monument superimpose and swing back and forth like an upside-down metronome, in tense relationship to one another and unstable in their power. The sound bounces between speakers, combining an invented “ticking” with the whirring of an oscillating fan that blows from left to right as the structures rock. The erratic rhythm echoes the fluctuating pace of change -- of regimes, institutions and mindsets. The balance has not been struck.

Pyramidal forms and all-seeing eyes occur in art across time including Man Ray’s Object to be Destroyed, later reconstructed and retitled Indestructible Object. Before the 2011 Revolution, Egypt was the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, so connections between the two countries are more than symbolic. Questions arise after every revolution: Will tyranny persist or dissolve altogether? Is democracy or the people’s will (in any country) to be destroyed or indestructible?

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On PACE's references:

Man Ray’s Indestructible Object resembles an obelisk. It was originally made in 1923 and titled Object to be Destroyed. It consists of a wooden metronome with a photograph of his former lover’s eye attached to the pendulum that can beat insistently and infinitely, like human desire. In 1933, the artist destroyed the original, producing and re-titling the work in an edition of 100, asserting that ‘it would be very difficult to destroy all hundred.’

The female eye in Man Ray’s piece might function as the omnipotent eye that is discussed in Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny where it is associated with anxiety and fear of an external power that we rarely regard as benign. Another omnipotent eye, the Eye of Providence, crowns a pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States, printed on the U.S. dollar bill; its source can be traced to the Egyptian Eye of Horus.