A PAIR OF SHOES
Type: Classwork
Instructor: Peter Halquist
Year: 2020
Duration: 3 weeks
Location: Marfa, Texas
Team: Independent
Imaginary cowboys drink Coca Cola. The floor of the bar is covered in bottle caps. Everyone drives the 1980 Batmobile. Above the fake store, a faceless model of a human reaches for shoes hanging from a freestanding electrical wire but he cannot reach them. There is a couple that lay on top of the building and look up at the sky but you can’t hear what they’re saying, or if they’re saying anything at all. Superficial wanderers gather in a place in order to stare at the entrance and make do with their wasted reality.
Coherence and resolution are irrelevant here, instead, only cheap attempts to conjure up visceral emotion are allowed. Quick, dirty, sloppy—reliant on tricks like sunset and silhouette and symbol. They reach for something that is not there, as if the shoes on the wire. Just like the empty desert is vapid, the white figure is too, and the shoes, and the project, and so on, and so on. The list is listless.