An Atlas of the Invisible, 2018. Collaboration with Summer Mei Ling Lee.
For the exhibition re:home, Summer Lee and Laura Boles Faw have created an installation and a performance as a continuation of a series of collaborative performances and installations on the themes of displacement, communication, and the flight of the creative class from San Francisco. The work is built from the act of correspondence between the two artists who live on opposite coasts since the recent departure of Boles Faw from San Francisco after 13 years living there as an artist and educator.
Since this summer, the artists have written each other in invisible ink that when exposed to the flame of a candle becomes visible, sometimes legible, and occasionally consumed. This form of correspondence is slow, at times ludicrously so. It is private, intimate, and ephemeral in its making and its revealing. For the installation, the artists assembled these correspondences into a tangle of rudiment technologies, mirroring their art-making process whereby Boles Faw is physically absent — employing different forms of technology, for better or for worse, to craft a collaborative work.
The installation and performance seek to allude to a long history of creative adaptation and artistic determination. The work also seeks to question the role of technology, especially in the Bay Area, as a charade of improvement and innovation as communication becomes faster and more superficial, all while the tech economy threatens to homogenize the financial and cultural landscape of the Bay Area.
The artists would like to thank Melanie Piech for her invaluable work of programming the signaling lights and building the outlet board component of the installation.