Edythe F. Wright
Sharp®town
To create Sharp®town, Edythe F. Wright enlarged the components of a tiny circuit-board enmeshed in the guts of a Sharp® television by 3800%. This simple, though substantial, increase in scale enables several marvelous transformations: an object becomes a place, digital components become architecture, and the miniscule becomes colossal. Size becomes even more confused with the introduction of the O-scale model train, which itself is 1/48 the size of a real train. In Sharp®town, the puzzle of sizes leads to uncertainty about the viewer’s physical and conceptual relationships with this beautiful and mysterious city.
Edythe F. Wright conducts much of her regular artistic practice as The Institute for Domestic Archaeology, a fictional social science research institution devoted to “discovering signs of meaning in the objects of everyday life.” The Institute has applied actual and pseudo-scientific methodologies in detailed “studies” of, among other things, a telephone, an easy chair, a vacuum cleaner, stuffed animals, and the Wonderbra®. These investigations, which often take the form of involved multi-media installations, reveal the complexity, economy, ubiquity, mystery, absurdity, and importance of mass-produced consumer items.
Image: E Edythe F. Wright, Sharp®town, (detail), 2007, Lent by the Artist