Decoy Decoy is designed around a multitude of embodied experiences. The broadest feature to point out is that in one room, objects are given a sculptural power over the viewer’s body with an implied potential for violent contact. The relationship is reversed in the other room where the soft organic presence of the body confronts a sterile museum environment through two scores (below).

The scores reference opposite ends of this spectrum of human-ness: scents are ephemeral, shifting and difficult to codify, yet they can activate memories subconsciously. This fluidity relates to a sense of fleshiness that’s so essential to being a body (in the arrangement of cranial nerves, the olfactory nerve is #1 and the optic nerve is #2, but the enigmatic “nerve nulla,” CN0, is our brains’ most direct line to the physical world and the one responsible for hormones and pheromones). This is precisely what enables the claim that Ylang-ylang (or any other substance) is an aphrodisiac: by containing compounds that are chemically similar enough to pheromones in order to “pass.” There are other essential oils famous for doing this, like rose, neroli, and jasmine, but none of those have reduplicative names which roughly translate to “wilderness wilderness” (translated from Tagalog).

On the other hand, the tattoo is not a product of flesh but a mark inscribed into it, a tension between the endurance of a symbol and mortality. The simple line is a gesture toward the gesture, the ability to signify and codify: language eternal (but it’s also a 1” line so you’ll always have something to measure with). In these times, tattoos hold a place somewhere between religious experience and vapid consumerism, but that’s not very different from any other form of creative expression.

The vertical feedback loop creates a sucking vortex as the TV rotates slowly, suggesting a pixel purgatory or a portal to technology’s promised land. Viewers can insert varying degrees of their image into the system, with corresponding levels of risk. A hand can enter the frame without much danger, but there’s a higher price to move from anonymity to personal specificity. To capture the ultimate source of recognition—the face—and place their identity in the system, the viewer has to subject themself to the (seemingly) precarious ninety-pound CRT dangling above. And yet they are unable to gaze upon their own visage; instead their image gazes un-confronted upon their own body in an absurd form of self-surveillance (while the museum’s security camera and motion detector carry on in the corner). Along those lines, the material relationship between object and technology is inverted: a massive structure is propped up easily while technology (often conceptualized without concern for infrastructure or materiality) is so weighted. Traditionally, objects are granted this weighty authority, and language is soaked with positive connotations for more size and strength. Concurrently, technology is seen as an ethereal concept outside of material burdens, or even as a savior from physical responsibilities. In the installation, the large sculpture is ghostly and light while the “immaterial” video possesses a precarious mass.

Meanwhile in the box, the other monitor receives a distorted version of the video signal which makes it look defective and calls up the entropy that’s intolerable in the design/tech world. However, the impenetrability of that image is mostly due to the abstract original source (the feedback loop); when a form breaks the feedback the image translates relatively well, especially if it presents a pre-understood pattern (like facial recognition). If Drain was exploring light in the black box, Decoy Decoy is bringing the same investigation to the white cube. As in Drain, the image inside the box makes its presence known by bouncing soft, cold flashes off the blank interior. Without harsh shadows to create linear perspective, the interior of the box loses definition and approaches the idea of a virtual space, perceptually boundless with highly specific physical parameters, like an infinity-curved photo studio or game environment. Repeated use of reflected light comes from an enduring interest in Plato’s cave, specifically the symbolism of reflected light as illusion and incident light (the fire, the sun, the TV) as the source of higher understanding or another dimension.