Units

Artist: Sam Gomez 

Date: May 1 to 13, 1998 

Sam Gomez's light box used repeated transparencies of a night-time apartment building to invoke the ubiquity of modern life. This representation of a metropolitan nightmare is an allegory of modernization's reduction of the human individual to a unit within the codes of superstructures that dominate modern life. It deals with the co-existence of seduction and oppression found in modernization. Enchanting like glittering embers from a fire, or sparkling like a starlit sky, the windows simultaneously echo computer information, cursors, pixels and any other system of the technological world.

Like someone accessing such a system of control, the viewer was able to peer into the private spaces of large numbers of individuals. There was no one looking back in confrontation. Here, the human presence was expressed indirectly in types of lighting, drapes, furniture etc. Yet, if not scrutinized, such timid personal insignia appear lost in the grid-like expansion of similar-looking windows. These small lightspots of hope neither defeat nor are defeated by their bleak framework. They simply co-exist.