AUB Art Gallery, Saleeby Museum, Beirut, Lebanon

2017

For the ‘Mimesis, Expression, Construction’ exhibition I continued my exploration of the subject of color, by setting up a direct dialogue with Khalil Saleeby’s life size piece, Carrie, 1966. I examined the selected work and inspired a palette of colors, from which I created a numbered chart. The placement of colors on this chart was based on a system of chance encounters.

The piece was a site-specific work that explored the participation of the audience. At the opening ceremony, and after the exhibition was up, the visitor was invited to pick seven colors from my chart (in reference to Newton’s division of the rainbow’s visible spectrum into seven colors). A larger duplication of the enumerated graph on a wood panel, hanged on the wall, next to Carrie. The viewer thus placed a pin on every color-number he had chosen. I intervened every other week, and connected with a white thin thread the pushed in pins of each participant. The resulting collective interaction generated the construction of an abstract work, with a specific pattern, reflecting a direct conversation between artist, audience, site and space.