Writer, Artist and Critic
Nexus, Philadelphia
"Containment" looked somewhat severe and laboratory-like, even slightly threatening on first impression. Past a neutral entryway adorned with two large acrylic paintings, straightforward depictions of monumental vases--traditional icons of containment--the viewer had to continue inside a room-sized, cage-like wire-mesh enclosure to see the rest of the show. The best view was gained by lying on a narrow, raised stainless-steel slab (an examining table, though in a different sense) at the room's dead center, then looking up at the ceiling. There, waves of carved, blue insulation foam rolled across the ceiling from edge to edge.
An explanatory paragraph connected these waves and whorls to a theory of physicist Steve Lamoreaux, who posits a kind of foam filling the vacuum of space, made up of erupting and collapsing particles produced by quantum fluctuations. As a direct experience (or without having read this), the blue foam read as water, impossibly frozen and clinging to the sky. Lying on the steel bed, this common-sense-defying perception led to a vertiginous flip-flopping of one's point of view.
Engaging with the physics added further richness to the visual metaphors, starting with the multiple pun on foam--who'd have thought insulation foam could offer a cosmological model? Imagining a constant dance of materializing and dematerializing particles, in a realm where common knowledge suggests there is nothing, is as dizzyingly difficult to grasp as the impression of water swirling on a ceiling. In the ensuing altered state, and as it would probably be in a foam-filled vacuum, gravity is up for grabs.
The initially ominous cage, in this light, became a touching joke: a hopelessly permeable model for containing the uncontainable--water, the dance of subatomic particles, the human participant. The sharp edges and reflective surfaces here may have borrowed from the received authority of experimental science, but the real authority lay in Wheeling's ability to bring her audience to the ticklish, paradox-sharp edges where new understanding may begin.
--Miriam Seidel