Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

The hand almost fills the twelve-foot height of the gallery space, its fingertips nearly touching the ceiling tiles. The ear hangs from the side of the building, a full storey tall. The eyeball is big enough to climb inside. The finger stands the size of a twelve-year-old child.

The sculptural components of Ilan Sandler’s installation, Three Senses, resemble updated parts of the ancient colossal statue of the emperor, Hadrian, whose fragments (a foot, a nose, etc) are still visible in Rome. The colossus, god-like, extended the power of his senses through sheer size: he saw (and presumably heard) far because he stood so tall.

In the rolling of the Eye through the landscape, and the floating of the Ear in harbour waters, Sandler has endowed his sculptural organs with mobility as well as enormous size. Marshall McLuhan liked to speak of media (whether of transportation or communications) as extensions of the body. Sandler’s Roaming Eye, which has traversed the cityscapes of Halifax, Philadelphia, New London (Connecticut) and Kitchener-Waterloo with a video camera on board, functions physically like a conveyance; it and Ear to the Sky provide one with the ability to perceive in places and times where one is not. We see what the Eye has seen, hear what the Ear has heard.

While the Hand is the same conventional shade of blue as the skin of Lord Krishna, however, the industrial, non precious material of which these body parts are made, and the humour that is never far away in Three Senses, undercut any sense of the objects being superhuman or divine. They irresistibly invite a certain kind of jocular word-play.

Lend me your ears. Offer a hand. Give him the finger. Roll your eyes. Like the famous first item on this short list—from Mark Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—such phrases are often examples of metonymy, figures of speech in which the part stands for the whole, “the container for the thing contained.” The thing contained in each of Sandler’s giant body parts is the concentrated power of sensory reception.

The Walls Have Ears

Now that every second college student has a video camera on her cell phone, the electronic extension of the senses is more than a commonplace: it approaches a point a saturation, whereby eyes and ears are exhaustingly present everywhere, all the time. We come to assume that a video camera is always pointed at us, not only in public spaces, but increasingly at home, through the cyclopian gaze of the Webcam. Both their ubiquity and their miniaturisation render these technologies of vision nearly invisible. One effect of the gigantism of Sandler’s installations is to drag the mechanisms of surveillance back across our threshold of perception, demanding that we give them our attention.

When the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery began planning the installation of Ear to the Sky on the exterior wall of the Loyola Building, the gallery had to consult with other university departments to ensure that the installation conform to the privacy clauses in the university’s collective agreements. One might think that a three-metre-high ear is, in itself, a fairly obvious clue that one is being listened to: nevertheless, the gallery posted a sign to advise passers-by that their conversations might be overheard by the indiscriminate aural scanning of the microphone embedded in the Ear’s canal.

There is a paradox here that illustrates the difficulty of reconciling traditional systems of social regulation with new technologies. The park bench beside the Ear, beloved of smokers, may be under observation from unidentified security cameras and any number of private cell phones. Under anti-terrorism measures and other legislation, conversations on those phones are subject to blanket monitoring by Canadian security agencies, as are the e-mails emanating from laptops and BlackBerries. Big Brother has lots of tiny eyes with which to watch you.

Eyes Bigger than your Belly

Under the fingernail of his single standing finger, Cocoon, Sandler has placed a small video screen that shows an image of the finger itself, cross-fading with an image of the artist seen from the back, lying nude in a semi-fetal position. The curve of his back matches the crook of the finger, proposing an equivalency between the part (the finger) and the whole (the body of the artist). It is our senses—particularly those of touch and vision—that give us our sense of our own bodies, at once finite in space and near infinite in sensory capacity. Our absorption in any one sense can make that sense stand, for a time, in the place of our entire being.

One sense can also translate itself into another, a phenomenon known as synaesthesia. Telephone companies, marketing what was then a purely aural communication, once invited us to “reach out and touch someone.” In Tactility, the recorded sound emitted by the hand’s palm has been generated from the firing of touch receptors in the hand of a laboratory monkey. We hear what the Hand has felt. Another displacement occurs when we realise that the sensory data are not human in origin, but produced by our primate relatives. Tactility opens the possibility that the sensory envelope out of which we construct our I-ness may not be as distinctively human as we might imagine.

Sense Impressions

In Table Talk, Sandler’s other project for this exhibition, we read what the flesh has suffered. The artist has stamped text into the copper surface of round table tops, installed in the food court of the Loyola Colonnade. The words and phrases derive from first-person accounts of being physically attacked. The artist recorded one account in the course of an earlier project in the United States; a second is that of an employee of the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, a victim of a swarming in Halifax in 2004. A third table is left blank, with an invitation for visitors to share memories of violence that might, in turn, find their way into permanent record.

The lunch table is a site of Kaffeeklatsch (literally, “coffee chat”), of friendly disclosures. The circle is the archetypal social diagram of democracy, equality, intimacy and trust. Within that protected circle, Sandler’s interview subjects disclose their experiences of that most intense violation of trust, violence against the body. On the copper skin of the table, our fingertips read the stamped surface as a metaphor for the enduring texts written into the skin and memory of the victim.

Sensory experience here undergoes a series of translations: from violent impacts into sense memories, into personal narrative, into disembodied text, into material object and back into sense impressions through the eyes and fingertips of those sitting down to break bread around a table. In sharing an account of acts that are themselves a denial of community, a community is constituted.

Ilan Sandler's Three Senses and Table Talk roam across the field of sensory perception, isolating first one sense and then another, enlarging them and presenting them for our consideration. Let's give him a big hand.

Robin Metcalfe

Arrest at Eastern State Penitentiary

Sometimes I get really angry and think that one person for one minute
for who knows what kind of reason has caused this incredible life change for so many people

A young woman is murdered. Her body is found, but the killer is not. Her heartbeat is arrested, but no arrest is made. Ilan Sandler’s Arrest explores with heartbreaking precision the distance between these two aspects of one event, the purgatorial space in which he and his family have lived since the death of his sister Simone in 1994 at the age of 21.

A cellblock in the long-closed Eastern State Penitentiary provided the environment for this work. This historic stone structure, dating to 1829, is thick with the atmosphere of lives lived, and extravagant with decay: peeling plaster, brick dust, moss, broken furniture. Rather than try to counter such an overwhelming presence with a large gesture, Sandler has used economical means to bend the weight of this prison environment into new meanings: piles of brick dust suggest the inert remains of a life, dust returning to dust. Streaming rust marks running down the back wall of a cell stand in for tears. Vaulted ceilings of cells and corridor become shrines to loss.

In my mind I need to know what happened and why it happened. I feel that she suffered most terribly

Inside the cells, heartbeats sound, alone or in thudding counterpoint as “recordings of Simone’s surviving family members. Along with these are their words, culled from recorded conversations and then rendered in a sweetly childlike cursive script in steel wire, that forms fragile, filigreed bars across the sixteen cell doors. All this precipitates an experience of deep inwardness: the interiority of a cell originally built for a single prisoner to contemplate his crime; the heartbeat heard as if inside the body; the curlicue wire messages floating in midair, as wispy as thoughts inside a head.

The effect of those thin “gates of text,” as Sandler calls them, is tricky, however. Sandler is exquisitely sensitive to point of view, here and in other works . And his conceptual layering is as subtle and effective as his choice of materials. On the most overt level, we look inside cells closed off by words. The survivors of a horrific crime are imprisoned, in this sense, by their thoughts. They are stuck with their own suffering, deprived of closure.

To know does not close anything

But the gates are permeable, at least perceptually as thin screens that allow us to hold two views at once: flat and deep, steel and inner space, words and physical brick dust, rust, light on walls. In this duality we can begin to imagine the perpetrator inside a cell, caught now, and made to see everything through the screen of those thoughts: held in a kind of apparatus for the inducement of remorse. In this sense, Sandler has constructed a sacralized space for an imagined communal ritual, leading to remorse on one hand, and catharsis on the other .We cannot go into the future feeling only a loss

An equivalence balances finely on the fulcrum of the wire gates, of two purgatories as one real and one imagined; the family’s and the perpetrator’s. Sandler’s piece honors the first, in the perpetually unfinished state of emotional incompleteness of his family, and opens the possibility of the other. The recorded sound of birds heard at the end of the cellblock, taken from the surroundings where Simone’s body was found, seems to offer the promise of some alchemical change inside the affected hearts, some small movement toward peace.

Miriam Seidel

Miriam Seidel is a corresponding editor for Art in America.

1 His Roaming Eyeball (2002), for example, is a structure engineered to manifest shifting points of view; and his outdoor public artwork, the 614-foot long Pulse, is conceived to be seen from multiple, fast-moving vantage points.
2 Another work, The Mouse Project (1999–2000), was completed with a ritual act, the covert burial of a mouse’s remains in a museum wall.

Double Storey

To begin with, simply because it is so big, Ilan Sandler’s Double Storey provokes a number of associations, the first being with childhood: Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann, or Goldilocks. A chair too big to climb into has a certain whimsy, but also a potentially disruptive aspect, precisely because it denies us access. In this case, that exclusion might merely remind us that, after all, this is not a chair, it’s a sculpture. But beyond that, giant versions of ordinary objects do have a primal looming aspect, perhaps taking an unsettling Freudian form of half-retrieved memories from childhood, when we couldn’t quite reach anything, when we were too small to negotiate our surroundings. Robert Therrien’s Under the Table (1994), a vast wooden dining room table and chairs that we can walk between and under, exploits that undercurrent of both childhood play and anxiety.

There is something quite different from the dollhouse-in-reverse feeling of Therrien’s work, though, in Double Storey. Comprised entirely in graceful lines of steel and nylon, Double Storey looks more like a diagram or idea of a chair. Because of its scale and the absence of a seat—it is strung with gossamer nylon threads—this chair has no apparent function. It might even be taken as the impersonation of a Platonic ideal of a chair. Such grand philosophical allusion is also a paradoxically familiar and comfortable cliché. Let us say that this chair proposes the possibility of being an ideal form, while at the same time maintaining its real world integrity as a very ordinary physical object; that is, a cheap collapsible chair. As such, it also situates itself within the popular culture fashion for “retro” objects, things that would have once seemed beneath notice or just cheesy, but which now are regarded with ironic and nostalgic fondness.

There is also a folk artish element to the chair. At least five towns in the United States have giant chairs, often in conjunction with a furniture factory. A twelve foot tall Mission Oak chair was made in Massachusetts in 1905, and, over the intervening century, many more have been built and vandalized or exceeded in size by other competing chairs. In the early 1980’s, Miller Office Supply of Anniston Alabama built a thirty-three-foot-tall steel office chair, weather and vandal proof, in a vacant lot beside the store. But Sandler’s chair is not in a vacant lot, it is in a sculpture garden, and from that position it generates a pedigree within the history of twentieth century art and design.

Many of the legendary modernist chairs of the twentieth century, still in production, exploited tubular steel for the lightness, strength, and flexibility of its support. These chairs more or less fulfilled the “purist” theory that every utilitarian object tended to become more efficient, economical, and streamlined over centuries of use, shedding extraneous ornament, and refining the materials of construction. We might think of Marcel Breuer’s landmark “Wassily” chair, with its sling of leather across the tubular steel frame, whose clean efficient lines afford the illusion of floating while sitting. Yet, the prototype for Ilan Sandler’s chair is not the kind of chair that could be marketed as a “classic” by a museum reproduction shop—at least, not yet. Double Storey is not even the sort of wrought iron or wicker or Adirondack chair sanctioned for stylish casual use. It is just a generic folding chair, cheap and outmoded, that would have bright nylon webbing (not modernist designer pony hide or leather) for its seat and back. It is the kind of chair that, in some recent past, you folded up and took along to a picnic, or to watch a parade.

Scale has always been an issue for sculptors; and in the past forty years, it has been heavily theorized. Since the viewer occupies the same space as the sculpture, artists have intended to make work that makes us conscious of the ways that an object can disrupt our usual navigation of the spatial environment. Objects may be intended to be obstructive, to oblige us to walk around or over them, to engage us in ways other than standing and admiring. Amongst other tactics, making sculptures that are apparently too big or too small confounds our expectations and intensifies our perceptions. There are also emotional reactions triggered by scale. Things on a monumental scale can either be exploited for their ominous aspects (as in Richard Serra’s great tower of precariously balanced steel slabs) or for their comic disproportion (Jeff Koons’ giant puppy.)

Ilan Sandler has written about the way that Double Storey, as a framework of a chair, is also a frame that brackets our views of the city out from the ordinary continuum of looking. This is in the long tradition of the picturesque, going back to the eighteenth century and surviving in popular photography manuals, which advise us to “frame” whatever we are looking at. We see something more intensely, as if a picture of itself, if it is set off in this way.

Sandler has also written about the functioning of the chair precisely where it is now: in a sculpture garden. There, it is meant to be a perch for the imagination, and also an object that, in the middle of peripatetic city life, “allows rest and contemplation.” In this expressed ambition, Sandler echoes Matisse’s famous “Notes of a Painter” (1908):

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.

Here Matisse proposes something like a secular equivalent to the contemplative function traditionally associated with religious images. This idea of an art that allows respite has been mildly unfashionable for much of the past century, as artists have explored ways of attacking any forms of complacency. In a curious way, Matisse’s proposal was borne out by Le Corbusier’s machine aesthetic: if a chair is, as he proposed, “a machine for sitting in,” then it needs to be perfectly adapted to the ergonomics of the sitter—it has to be comfortable.

Sandler evokes both the restful and the deliberately restless. Gleaming and soaring (the proportions of the legs are slightly elongated to enhance the perceived height), Double Storey appeals to the modernist love of sleek industrial materials. Because its unglamorous nylon webbed seat has been omitted, Sandler’s chair is like a stylishly high modernist version of its prototype, the unlovely, aluminium framed utility chair. And, in the end, the chair of which Double Storey is both a description and an apotheosis is collapsible, meant—like the temporary sculpture installation—to be folded up and carried away.

Elizabeth Legge,
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Toronto 2003

Globe and Mail: October 14, 2006

Now open: a drive-by gallery At Pearson, three Canadian sculptors improve the view from the 401

DEIRDRE KELLY

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s . . . a piece of sculpture?

Motorists travelling Highway 401 past Pearson International Airport aren’t seeing things.

There, on a mound of mud and sod that is usually home to the roar of traffic and the worst wind tunnel this side of the prairies, now sit three gargantuan pieces of contemporary art, installed just last week.

The sculptures, each by a Canadian artist and made of honking chunks of weather-resistant metal that loom mightily over Canada’s largest and busiest highway, cost an estimated $700,000 to produce but are free for the two seconds of viewing afforded by a fast-moving vehicle.

And they’ll be sticking around for the next three years as part of Artstage, a new public art exhibition on the airport’s grounds. It’s the result of a collaborative effort led by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority and curator Andrew Davies, and underwritten by corporate sponsors.

Carl Skelton, one of the artists commissioned to participate, calls it a poem on the side of the highway.

“Things around here are always appearing and disappearing,” the Toronto native said this week, on-site at the unconventional outdoor gallery, planes sliding silently in and out of the clotted clouds overhead.

“My piece asks what changed since the you last drove by it. What is the light like? It makes you look at this place as something beautiful.”

Mr. Skelton’s contribution to the project, Still Life, is a series of 250 steel panels—orange, blue, red and black—seamlessly welded to form an undulating, 23-metre-long wall of vibrant colour.

It’s flanked on one side by Montrealer Michel de Broin’s aluminum Airline (a staircase that launches into a coiling shape that resembles one of the overhead loops of the nearby highway), and on the other side by Ilan Sandler’s The Book (a 3.3-metre-tall tome with one page—punctuated with etched lettering and ideogrammic forms— floating away).

Irene Hawrylyshyn, senior manager of corporate and cultural programs for the GTAA, says Artstage is an effort to inject some personality into the lands surrounding Pearson Airport.

It was an outgrowth of architect Moshe Safdie’s recent rebuilding of Terminal One, where artworks by such internationally acclaimed artists as Ingo Maurer are already on display.

“The funding was in place for that initiative,” she says.

“This is a continuation of that, and it’s been a bit of a community effort which we’ve been happy to support.”

In fact, Pearson and its environs were a source of inspiration to the artists. Mr. Sandler, a native of South Africa who resides in Halifax, says the behemoth of an airport was on his mind as he conceived his piece.

“The airport is a hub of modern-day technology—it’s a site of transit and change,” he says. “And books themselves are both objects and also metaphors for containment. I was researching containers when I was asked to submit an idea for the project, and for me, books are transporters of language and ideas.

“When creating for this space, I wanted a book that was ripping apart, that was part of this site, part of the high winds and the speed of the passersby.”

It’s a profound concept that sinks into the soft matter of the brain even while the zoom of the highway forms a barrier to quiet contemplation.

But that’s the charm of Artstage. Even with the world crashing by, the artworks hold sway. They seize the imagination—even if glimpsed in the flash of chrome and steel.

The Coast: Vol 13 Num 18
Sep 29–Oct 6 2005

On a roll

SUE CARTER FLINN

Fearless art correspondent Sue Carter Flinn lends a hand rolling a giant eyeball through downtown on its way to installation.

“Um, this may sound strange, but have you seen a…” The painter cuts off the question in mid-sentence, as he leans over his scaffolding and opens a pack of Players. Using a fresh cigarette as a pointer, he nods, “The giant ball? It rolled that way, towards the Commons.”

By the time the ball—which isn’t really a ball but a 2.54-metre-tall, stainless steel spherical cage equipped with a digital video camera—is located, it’s crossed the Halifax Common and is sitting on Bell Road in front of locked-out CBC television employees. Ilan Sandler, the artist who designed the traffic-stopping piece, crosses the street to explain his project to the group, while his assistants, fellow artists Tania Sures and Aaron Schmidt, take a rest before the next challenge: Citadel Hill.

This roaming eyeball is an integral component of an installation by Sandler called Three Senses. Imagine if your senses—sight in this case—were removed from your body and allowed to experience life on their own, roaming the streets of Halifax. It’s absurd, Sandler admits, as he directs the eyeball to record video of the soon-to-be-destroyed NSCC building and the thick trunk of a tree, but he’s interested in the unusual coincidences and panoramic patterns—sky, cityscape, asphalt, grass—that the ball experiences.

“I want to pick up images that are particular to Halifax. Inevitably there are some surprises,” he says. “As we walk around, you observe what’s at the plane of your height. You’re never this close to the ground or the upper reaches of the sky.”

Once the city tour is over, Sandler, who is also director of Centre for Art Tapes, will edit three hours of video into “10 really interesting minutes.” The video, along with photos and the eye itself, will be on display at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery from October 6 to November 20, along with representations of two other senses: hearing and touch.

Formed out of cotton-candy pink high-density foam, “The Ear” is what the artist refers to as a “passive listening device.” For the length of the exhibition, the oversized three-metre-tall representation will be fixed onto the outside of SMU’s Loyola residence. A microphone tucked into its canal will pick up bits of conversation and street noise; those with voyeuristic tendencies can listen in from a pair of headphones inside the gallery. It’s not exactly an accurate surveillance piece—Sandler mixes in previously recorded conversations and sounds. There’s a Hitchcockian mood to “The Ear”: things are never as they appear, or, in this case, how they sound.

Completing the trio of dislocated senses is a ceiling-grazing hand.

“Touch is the most difficult sense to relate to somebody,” says Sandler, guiding the eyeball across Trollope Street to the base of Citadel Hill. The eyeball makes a harsh scraping sound on the sidewalk before relaxing on the grass. “So I converted touch to sound.”

In the giant hand is a large speaker playing sounds from hands touching a variety of objects. Sandler contacted researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who recorded sounds emitted from receptors in monkeys’ hands in an attempt to better understand their sensory complexities. The two sources are mixed in what Sandler refers to as a polyphonic soundscape.

The eyeball takes Citadel Hill with ease, much to the confusion of a Harbour Hopper tour operator who is stunned into momentary silence by its sight. As Sandler checks the videotape, he explains the last installation, Table Talk, to be installed in a popular Loyola food court. Two copper tabletops are etched with stories from victims of violence—one from Philadelphia, and the other, a swarming victim from Halifax. Text taken from transcripts and from interviews Sandler conducted with the victims is permanently “stamped into the copper, the same way violence is literally engrained into the minds of the victims.”

Sandler explains the connection between the victims’ stories and Three Senses: “It still deals with a sensory experience. It’s a literal portrayal of senses being shocked—both the victim and the person reading it.”

A third copper tabletop will be left blank, with encouragement for other victims or witnesses of violence to come forward to tell their stories.

The eyeball and crew finish their brief break and carry on to the Public Gardens and through the south end. With a mere blink of an eye, they vanish from sight.

Three Senses and Table Talk at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, October 6 to November 20, 2005.

Public Art Review: Fall Winter 2002

Arts in Transit’s program of the Bi-State Development Agency in Saint Louis, Mo., presents Pulse:Rhythms of the City, a piece by arttist Ilan Sandler that will remain on display for one year. Near the intersection of Interstates 70 and 170, the Saint Louis MetroLink light rail crosses a bridge over Interstate 70. On this bridge, at the nexus of transportation routes and of people, the artist installed a fifteen-foot-high 614-foot-long piece over the course of seven nights with help from BSDA crews. The sculpture appears as a line of bright orange corrugated plastic duct material attached to a grid of steel aircraft cable. The line does indeed pulse along the tracks and is easily viewed from the highway and inside MetroLink. The staggered curved and pointed line evokes numerous biological and transportation metaphors, from heartbeats to electrical activity to transportation hubs and the community itself. Funding support for Pulse was provided by The Missouri Arts Council and the Regional Arts Commission of Saint Louis.

The Wall Street Journal
Leisure and Arts
Wednesday, August 28 2002

Time Off / Sculpture

Pulse:Rhythms of the City

STUART FERGUSON

St. Louis

Trains, planes and automobiles: Commuting in St. Louis now has a silver lining—more time to appreciate Ilan Sandler’s just-completed sculpture, commisioned by Arts in Transit. Stretched along the MetroLink light rail system where it crosses the Interstate, the 15 feet high 614 feet long grid of steel cable and a “pulsing” line of bright orange plastic duct material resembles the heartbeat on a monitor. And at night it should be visible to those taking off and landing at the airport.

Junction I-70 and I-170.

Through 2003

City Paper
August 30–September 6, 2001

Solitary Assignment

Two exhibits in Eastern State Penitentiary explore crime from the prisoner’s and the victim’s perspectives.
by Susan Hagen

Arrest and Unimaginable Isolation: Stories from Graterford
Through Nov. 4, Eastern State Penitentiary, 2124 Fairmount Ave.

Writing on the wall: A piece from Ilan Sandler’s installation, Arrest.

Violence, crime, grief and compassion. Two exhibitions installed this summer at Eastern State Penitentiary illuminate these experiences. The first is an installation of 13 audio and visual self-portraits of men currently serving time in Graterford. The second is an installation by Philadelphia artist Ilan Sandler, which deals with his family’s response to the unsolved murder of his sister, Simone Sandler, in Toronto seven years ago. These shows highlight contrasting aspects of crime and human nature and use different approaches to the process of making art.

I visited Eastern State a few weeks ago, on one of the hottest days of the summer. Entering Cellblock Eight, I heard a dozen or so murmuring voices. Here, and elsewhere in the prison, the beautiful barrel-vaulted ceiling and elegant skylights are lined with crumbling plaster and peeling paint. Along the corridor photos and written biographies of prisoners stick out at eye level on small signboards, and self-portrait paintings (all about 48-by-48 inches) hang in the cells. In many cells, audiotapes the artists made about their personal history and current experiences play. Lily Yeh, Glenn Holsten and Gerry Givnish worked with the inmates for nearly a year to produce the self-portraits.

William “Sonny” Gravil’s self-portrait is a forboding image, with barbed wire below the figure and a dove and sun above. In his tape he describes the sounds of the prison at night: quiet conversations and the footsteps of guards. An oversized mug shot forms the center of Gerald Mayo’s self-portrait triptych, with autobiographical text on the side panels. Tyrone A. Werts’ self-portrait shows a stoic man, his dark, serious face flushed with turquoise, chartreuse and scarlet. Many of the artists maintain their innocence, but others discuss their remorse, grief, loneliness and self-doubt. Family relationships are important to all of them. The stories and paintings of these artists are primarily therapeutic and sociological in their importance, but the raw urgency of their self-expression allows us to understand something deeper about human nature. The self-portraits in Unimaginable Isolation are filled with rich details and are raw, troubling and sad, and here and there, humorous and remarkable.

As I went farther into the prison complex to Cellblock Ten, the site of Ilan Sandler’s installation, sound was the first thing I encountered once again. Here the continuous sound of the amplified heartbeats of Simone Sandler’s five immediate family members play on eight speakers throughout the cellblock. Four additional speakers continuously play sounds taped at the place Simone’s body was found. These are natural and urban ambient noises (at times it’s not clear if they are part of the soundtrack or from the city beyond the walls of the prison), sounds of birds singing, water rushing and dripping, and a train whistle. The rhythm of the heartbeats corresponds with the rhythm of the ambient sounds, and these external and internal sounds combine—like John Cage’s Zen-inspired work—with a randomness that makes us keenly aware of where we are.

In the dark doorways of the cells on both sides of the long corridor, Sandler has installed grillwork in the shape of text—each an excerpt of a conversation the family had about the murder of Simone. The cursive script is handmade out of stainless-steel wire and mounted in horizontal bands within a heavier oxidized steel gate. The quotes are short and personal, expressing feelings of generosity (“We set up two memorials to benefit young girls”), anger (“I would like to know that the person who did this is dead”) and hope (“We cannot go into the future only feeling a loss”). The family’s feelings about the official response to the murder were included too: “In the judicial process victims are often forgotten. They are made secondary by the court’s attempts to understand the criminal’s motivation” and “If someone is given life for taking a life there are no winners, none at all.” A few of the cells are completely dark, but most are dimly lit by a tiny skylight within. Some cells are completely empty, as if to magnify the emotional desolation of this story. A few have plant life struggling to survive in the pale light.

Sandler’s conceptually-based installation is deeply compelling because of the cool restraint in his exploration of painful emotions—emotions that have been distilled and sharpened. I spoke with Sandler (born in Johannesburg, South Africa and raised in Toronto) about the project. He told me the idea of doing a work of art about his sister’s murder—partly as gift to his family—had been in his mind for a while, and Eastern State Penitentiary was the right place for it. He said he was “intrigued by the opportunity to work with the prison in a project, and interested in the social history of the place, the architecture, the light, the decay and the sense that lives were lived there.” Like Sandler’s past work, where he draws from science, physics and theater to make idiosyncratic conceptual art projects, Arrest metaphorically stops us in our tracks and launches us into another state.

Arrest and Unimaginable Isolation are both well worth seeing, offering much to think about above and beyond aesthetic issues. Though very different, these two exhibitions show individualized violence and pain, and they ask for our attention, compassion and—possibly—social action.