Verbal Description: ATTENTION, 2022

Narrator: This large, moving sculpture includes two inflatable bright-red nylon arms extending from opposite gallery walls toward a jagged rock on the floor between them. One nylon arm has been sewn such that it is reaching its pointer finger out toward the rock, its four other fingers pulled into its palm. The other reaches with an entirely outstretched hand, its palm toward the floor. Both are larger-than-life and are propelled into an intermittent flapping movement by air-blowers mounted high on the walls of the gallery space. When the blowers are off, the arms drift down onto the floor. When the blowers are on, the hands repeatedly dance and brush the rough surface of the locally-sourced rock on the floor of the gallery.

In ASL, one common method of getting someone’s attention involves waving with your palm downward in another person’s field of vision. Alternatively deaf people often tap each other on the shoulder to get their attention. In this kinetic sculpture, by Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, the stone is shaped so as to suggest being eroded by the fingers’ touch, alluding to the process of “trying to get one’s attention or bring attention to something forever.”