ETERNAL RETURN

At the home of Meredith James
111 4th Ave, Apt. 10C
New York, NY

Curated by Nate Heiges as part of his Interiors series

January 13-17, 2017

Interiors is a new series of exhibitions, organized by Nate Heiges, each of which features the work of a single artist in their own home. Like most domestic social events, these shows will be short in duration--usually the length of a brunch, a cocktail party, an afternoon tea, or a long weekend. And they will open by invitation only. Intentionally intimate, this is a series designed to provide radical context for the work of a select group of artists. 
                                                                          

The primary work in this show will be Eternal Return, a re-presentation of the piece Möbius City which James created as a site-specific video installation for the Queens Museum:

"...inspired by the Museum's Panorama of the City of New York, the gigantic miniature with nearly 900,000 individual structures rendered at a scale of 1:1,200. Originally commissioned for the 1964 New York World's Fair, the model may be a static, old-fashioned way of representing space, but it is unsurpassed in its ability to show an urban environment as a three-dimensional totality. James found her East Village apartment building on the Panorama, imagined her apartment in it, and pictured herself inside of it [...] Möbius City is a fantastical daydream in the form of sculptural installation with video structured around three real spaces: the artist's apartment in a 12-story building on 4th Avenue and 12th Street; its double as a near-life size sculpture; and the tiny model of the apartment building standing 2 inches tall on the Panorama."

At the Museum, the viewer was able to peer into the near-life size scale model of James' apartment and examine the furniture and objects therein-radically simplified as the buildings in the Panorama were simplified-through the window. In the installation, the video stands in for the mirror near the bed, creating a fictional reflection that features not only the Panorama, the scale model, and the real apartment, but also Meredith herself, and a radically simplified scale model of her own body, which also navigates all three spaces. 
Re-presenting this work in her apartment is the final curve in the loop of layered versions of spaces that make up the möbius strip of public, private, real, and imaginary in James' piece. Having once abstracted that space, we now have an opportunity to re-enmesh ourselves into Meredith James' analog digital world in which the set becomes the screen.