Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5

Casey Gollan
Born 1991 in Los Angeles, CA
Lives in New York, NY

Victoria Sobel
Born 1990 in Washington, DC
Lives in New York, NY

In their work, Casey Gollan and Victoria Sobel and their frequent collaborators examine the metaphors that underpin the language and physical structures of institutions. For their 2017 Biennial installation, they selected a bay of windows that is often covered by a wall. Words and images, framed within a hopscotch court and windowpanes, invite the viewer to symbolically cast a stone or traverse the text. At the same time, the work is a provocation: an expression on the window, “UNDER THE SIDEWALK...ANTS...!” reworks a phrase from the 1968 student strikes in Paris that was a threat to topple the university system. With this reference, Gollan and Sobel point to the idea of “stigmergy,” the process by which insects communicate through leaving physical traces on their environment, a phenomenon that testifies to the power of group coordination.