Natasha Johns-Messenger

The Sixth Borough

XYZ: NYC 10 Downing

Natasha Johns-Messenger invites participant viewers to experience her spatial works by playing with expectations of particular sites. For Re-Collection, a site-determined piece made for No Longer Empty, she has constructed a spatial installation in which, at certain points, what is real and what is illusion mesh into the unknown. Strategically positioned mirrors and apertures operate inside constructed corridors to create a gap between what is known and perceived. Inside the existing house on Governor’s Island, the viewer is blocked off from seeing the whole space at once. Instead, the corridor leads the participant on a particular journey in which one sees only sections of view at a time. The conceptual basis for the work stems from a desire to make a real-time installation that acts metaphorically as a fragmentation of the house in time and place.