Todd Slaughter: Protected Comforts
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Todd Slaughter addresses our futile hope for permanence in many of his 25 mordantly witty sculptures and installations at the Chicago Cultural Center. Four accordion files mounted on the same wall are cast of such substances as salt and paprika; the drooping slots of Salt Archive, October 1993 heighten the impression of dissolution over time. Comfort Zone, April 1993 consists of a sofa and chair cast in salt from actual objects and enclosed in a large glass box. Their faint blue color comes from the binding agent Slaughter used, and the casting is precise enough to preserve tiny wrinkles in the pillows and the pattern in the fabric of the chair. Vaporizers in the box hasten the sculpture’s decay–a few chunks have fallen off the sofa’s edge.
Slaughter, who was born in Memphis in 1942 and now teaches at Ohio State in Columbus, got a graduate degree in industrial design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He’s always made fine art but also worked as an industrial designer until about 1978. (“I was going to save the world–fill it with beautiful objects,” he told me.) His graduate thesis concerned the design of playground equipment, for which he did readings in “child psychology and the psychology of play”; he says he “wanted to do things that were meaningful and not just stylizing.” Slaughter’s current work similarly critiques our fetishization of objects based on their appearance. One untitled work (2002) is a gold casting of a piece of popcorn, brightly lit and mounted behind glass like jewelry in a store.
Protected Comforts (2002), which references horror movies, is even creepier. The viewer enters a small square enclosure to sit in a tall chair under a peaked plastic roof. On one of its faces a video is projected of silhouetted figures apparently walking on the roof, accompanied by loud thumping noises that resemble thunder, which Slaughter created by magnifying, distorting, and layering the sounds of tapping on a cardboard box. The image is similarly layered: Slaughter shot a video of people walking one at a time across a Plexiglas floor he built for the purpose, then superimposed the images to show multiple figures clustered together. Here, instead of the individual grasping possessively, the viewer is trapped, beset, almost victimized by the object he desired, and the protection a home supposedly offers becomes as illusory as the stability of possessions.
