Tiffany Holmes had never considered herself squeamish–she’d been a premed student at Williams College before switching her major to art history–but a few years ago she came face-to-face with a fat mouse that had been living it up behind her stove. “I immediately sprinted to a chair,” she says. “At that moment, I joined the ranks of hundreds of females who have been stereotyped by Western society as mice-o-phobic.”
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She recalls trying to teach word processing to a group of middle school teachers. Several made excuses to get out of the class. They “were disoriented by the holy trinity of mouse, monitor, and keyboard,” she says. “Those who did manage to open the word processing application refused to touch the mouse after learning that the arrow keys would move the cursor in a more predictable manner.”
“When I move, I sit down and start a new piece,” says Holmes. “When I got here it snowed like three feet and I went to a pet store and got a mouse.” Her 99-cent purchase, Zack, had been earmarked as snake food.
She’ll have more collaborators for her performance on August 9, when four mice in exercise balls will be tracked by a camera and the resulting footage will be projected onto the gallery wall. At the same time, the mice will create their own “analog collaborative piece” on a large piece of paper as they roll over small piles of printer ink powder.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dorothy Perry.
