Slides
Oscar Figueroa
Installation with sculpture and painting
7 December, 2017 to 27 January, 2018
Reception: Thursday 7 December, 2017, 5-8pm

This body of work sketches around the idea of movement and what its potential could look like. Symbols of continuous movement are fragmented, or paused, suspended, frozen, cut off, isolated, and blinded. Fragmenting images of movement is a peculiar idea to me; it almost seems surreal to understand something moving and not moving at the same time, and in a way this series seems to visualize philosophical ideas about how movement could be understood. 

The idea of movement presented as the slide is an especially interesting motif for me. The entire ‘journey’ of movement is literally presented at the line that constructs the slide itself—from the top of the slide that continues to the bottom, the decline presents the immediate direction where an object would travel. To me, this is a hauntingly beautiful image—forever able to predict the direction of movement, and ever-present as a gesture, a static ‘ghost-movement’.

In this series, I am also interested in the idea of disallowing such a potential for movement, as presented in the use of rope to restrict access. But again, hauntingly, the potential for movement sits ever capable behind the rope. Transforming the slide, also, into carpet material, extends this idea of restriction; something friction-less becomes pasted onto the ground like a heavy, static, and unyielding object.