A soundtrack of rock-and-roll drumbeats and synthesized noises parallels the fliers’ aimless trajectories; the drums launch forth on promising starts, but falter and peter out.

Vertigo and peril are never far off. Given the large monitors mounted on the ceiling above, the sense of restrained peril invades even the installation materials themselves. The wind tunnel propelling the fliers cannot be seen, but a temporary suspension from gravity is being tested, both by the flyers and the monitors themselves. The universal order represented in the Sistine Chapel is here inverted: no divine covenant, just a careen through the clouds—provisional, precarious, unmoored.

text: Edwin Janzen

The series is a kind of family portrait, where the identity of each member becomes an extension of their choice of technology and how they arrange their physical space. It is intended as a snapshot of an era. Initially the artist assumed that the computer technology and the way people were using them would appear quickly obsolete, while the human relations would be more durable. But, while the relation of father, mother, brother, uncle, cousin, does not change, the people themselves did. They age, multiply and die.

In the artist’s family, his mother’s disdain for computers (her portrait shows her tech-free writing table) was always in conflict with his father’s early-adopter embracing of technology. The artist recalls the first time a computer came in the house was in 1975. His father set up a rudimentary computer terminal connected to the home dial-phone receiver on the mahogany dining-room table until his mom saw it and told him to take that ugly thing elsewhere.

Since then, the artist is both enthusiastic about new technology, and aware of how it changes things. As digital technologies continue to be more and more integrated into every aspect of our lives and even our bodies, Family Work Stations is a cautiously-nostalgic sign post made for future viewers looking back to see how things have changed and how that change might of happened.