tomorrow 'this comes from within' comes down!!

...and in honor of the dismantling I wish to post a piece that the writer/poet Tariq Zayid wrote about the installation. For me he captures the spirit and essense of 'this comes from within'.

Thank you Tariq!!!

Virginia Fitzgerald: Poetic Dresses, Magical Spaces

Ritual space is place transformed. What is around you is inside you and what is
inside you is around you. Mind and place have become what in Gaelic is beautifully called fighte fuaighte - woven into and through each other. What you make of it is your own, but moments like this don’t happen often and should be experienced when they come along.

In South Boston, at Medicine Wheel Productions, 110 K Street #9, the artist Virginia Fitzgerald has created a rare magical environment called ‘this comes from within’. Entering the room is part of the performance itself. Sheer black cloth falls in front of you, bearing forth a view of the room, shadowed, hazy, morphing to the touch. A subtle physical event that sets a mood of displacement and simultaneous discovery.

You enter. In the center of the room, lit from the inside - the main light available in the room - is an oversized dress with gorgeous folds and shapes,sensuous in its own power as objet d’art. As the eyes adjust to the low light, details emerge. What was a powerful dress now has other connotations. It is made of papier-mâché and eggshells. Hundreds of eggshells flowing downwards, thin cracks visible. Delicate yet maintaining a strong dignity of purpose. The interior light continues to create dimensions from every angle. The metamorphosis is elastic, absorbing.

Emerging as the eyes adjust further - figures, ivy, flowers, machines, contours of image and shadow. The walls, once unseen, are now alive. As if from within the dress the light emanates and creates right in front of you. Mutating forms appear in the naturalizing measure of eye adjustment, as film developed from Polaroid cameras. The dress seems to posses an extraordinary power.It is created and it is creator. Origin Goddess of experience and form casting its spell into the darkness and creating light, image, meaning, mystery, life as experience itself.

Toward the back of the room another mystery awaits. Through long cords of bead and cloth, a shape is cut into the back wall that glows red. Like Duchamp’s Étant donnés, though the viewing plane is wide open, another world is revealed within the wall opening. Lit in red, and draped with red velvet, the opening manifests all sorts of memories and antique incarnations. Rather than contextualize this exquisite redentity, I will leave you to create your own associations, as the space demands.

This is an installment that surrounds you with an open poetic space rather than pummel you with meaning. It is passive in its influence, but grips you with its intensity. It is ritualistic in that it takes you out of ‘ordinary’ space and puts you in touch with the imaginal realm. The possibility of travel is yours, the artist has provided the portal. How far you wish to travel is your point of entry and departure, physically and mentally.

Virginia Fitzgerald has created something special. A space to enter and become. Hers is a transcendent art, one of those phenomena many people have only been able to experience in dreams. This is the artist as sorceress of apparition. 'this comes from within' will be up until October 16th @
Medicine Wheel Productions,
110 K St # 9
Boston, MA 02127-1619
(617) 268-6700
gallery hours: m-f 10-4
Closing party : October 14th, 5:00- 8:00 pm