David Donavon
"This Deplorable Circumstance"
Site Specific Altered Event
I really love the whole creepy idea for this piece. The whole composition of the presentation in the Nash Gallery is real cool and kind of reminds me of a Resident Evil theme (favorite video game). To create this atmosphere, the artist had broken glass over framed instructions on how to participate in this art experience. There is an old wooden table kind of in the middle of the floor with an old desk lamp on it, shining on a creepy printed sign-up booklet. At the feet of the table, there are tons of burnt pages from the booklet and then a tv on the floor about five feet away, displaying creepy black and white, bad quality video of people participating in the psychological trip. What the piece is, is that the artist has a reserved space in some attic with sounds and other mind-altering mechanisms that are meant to test the durability of the human mind. This is a really creepy thing to play with, dealing with schizophrenia and other psychological diseases. I can't decide if the exhibit is actually real or not. They did a great job in creating the atmosphere and I kind of want to check out what the experiment is like, although I don't want this to affect how I actually think. So I probably won't. But I want to because it looks cool.
