Art Installation with Video:
    Monumental Construction with Paintings

Installation: A two-by-four has been propped athwart a low red-brick wall at the far end of a blacktopped roof. The board reaches just to the top of the concrete parapet of the wall. The back-drop is a large painting: a view from the south of a cross-section of an also red-brick, but faded, post-war apartment house. On a plane halfway back on the roof, to either side of the construction, are two other, somewhat smaller paintings, the contents of which are a water tower, a heating and air conditioning unit, and two white buildings, one old, one new. These two painted jumbles, the tops of which mimic the irregular top of a skyline, cut jagged sections from the apartment house. From the evidence of the light, all three paintings would seem to have been made on a sunny morning in late December. The construction has been artificially lit to mimic the light in the paintings.

Video #1: Same, but with a second two-by-four, propped athwart the first. The backdrop and framing pictures appear to have been painted about an hour after the paintings in #1: the light has shifted and brightened. The lighting on the construction has been adjusted accordingly.

Videos #2-#9: Same as installation and Video #1, with another board added each time, creating an increasingly dense, cross-hatched effect until, by #9, the boards have become an almost-solid, teepee-like structure. Meanwhile, the light has also kept changing. By #5, everything glows. By #9, parts of the paintings are in shadow, and the construction is menaced by shadows creeping across the roof.

Materials: Construction: brick, cement, wood, tar; backdrop painting: gouache; side paintings: oil pastel; all paintings on stretched canvas.

Size:
Construction: 144" (width) x 192" (depth); wall and two-by-fours, including parapet, 144" (width) x 42" (height,). Paintings: backdrop, 288" (width) x 264" (height); sides, 72" (width) x 226" (height, at highest points).

Overheard by artist at opening:
Comment #1: They use too much mortar, nowadays. It isn't as nice as the old brickwork.
Comment #2: Oh, gouache!
Comment #3: Water towers are such a cliché.
Comment #4: But there's no sky.
Comment #5: This looks like a real place. Couldn't he have just taken photographs?
Comment #6: Even if it isn't a real place, he could have done the whole project with computer imaging.
Comment #7: Yeah, I bet he could have saved a bundle.
Comment #8: Not to mention the environment. I mean, look at this list of materials! God, all that tar, wood, paint …
Comment #9: I like them. it? the picture? the construction? the installation? video? the …piece.

From the Critics: Monumental Construction with Paintings has yet to be reviewed.

Video #10: Same as installation and Video #9: At Night in the Gallery. The entire installation —boards, wall, roof, paintings— is in near darkness, lit only by the red glow of an emergency exit sign.

[Editor's Note… With special permission from the author, I am reprinting part of his original email below.]

Dear Sleet editors,
Please note that this piece does not include visual images (i.e. I didn't just forget to send them.)

Prose fiction by Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) has appeared in publications including The Avatar Review, big bridge, The Brooklyn Rail, Defenestration, diagram, Drunken Boat, elimae, Ellipses, ghoti, Mad Hatters' Review, Oregon Literary Review, Paper Street, SN Review, Third Wednesday,* Willow Review, and Word Riot. Singer has also published a chapbook, A Voice for My Grandmother (Ten Penny Players/bardpress, 2nd ed, 2008); and an e-book of long stories, The Second Kingdom (Cantarabooks, 2009). During 2010-2011, he is making three protracted visits to Africa to interview pro-democracy activists for a new book, Uhuru Revisited (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press).