Go On On Go

lip stick, cement, 8 styrofoam heads , latex paint, dog cones

Variable Dimensions

2022

The Elizabethan or cone dog collar (sometimes sardonically referred to as the “cone of shame”) is a truncated plastic cone designed to protect injured dogs from themselves—their primal instincts when seeking to bite or otherwise destructively attend to wounds they have received to their bodies or limbs. The cone’s form also blocks a dog’s peripheral vision, causing anxiety on top of constraint, a fragmented experience, and likely tunnel vision. Is the human condition so different than that of a dog forced to wear such a cone? This is one of the questions posed by Go On On Go. Especially as it relates to the artist’s coming up in the 1980s, where the Samuel Beckett phrase, “I must go on, I can’t go on,” along with its semantics, also held great meaning. The installation consists of two interrelated pieces. “A Side” and “B Side,” hung from the ceiling in loop and adjacent to each other, visually resembling an old-school 80s analog, reel-to-reel tape recorder. A Side is composed of eight styrofoam heads coated with cement and painted with industrial gray paint, each captured in an Elizabethan dog cone and suspended in a circle. Various hues of smeared lipstick tint the interior of each cone; the text creating negative space in the lipstick more clearly read where the lipstick is worn off. B Side loops with and echoes A Side. Go On On Go also depicts spectrums of the human condition where constraint and control edge against urge and possibility. Paradoxically, constraint can provide a wellspring of creativity, but can also frustrate, even debilitate. Constraint can limit risk unnecessarily amid our instincts and passions—our animality. Taken together, the constraining head-cone ensembles in their loops resolve as a formal amplifier and recording of expression. The lipstick coating the conic surfaces resolves as a representation of the burden or mask of or enticement for desire. With its redolent, muted colorization and waxen texture, what is more visceral than lipstick, which smears and leaves traces, retaining its tack even as it reveals what lay underneath.