WAITING FOR YVES
Sound: Yannick Franck from Vaiheessa (20 minutes)
Dimensions: Variable.
Over 2000 sq. feet of ultramarine oil bar applied by hand on rosin paper; 9 red lights (2 mechanically altered), ticket machine, headphones/mp3 players.
Braille and engraved ‘tickets’ with the quote “I can’t go on. I will go on.” from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Mary Sherman’s Waiting for Yves takes painting out of its historically frame- bound constraints and into the realm of space, time, sound and even the social sphere with its surround-sound, tactile and visual elements. The piece references both Yves Klein’s Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void) and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to create an open-ended narrative, pregnant with possibility, vast nothingness and the realization that one must just go on.

As with all her work, on the one hand researched and referential, modular and formal, Waiting for Yves is psychologically charged: the tactile surfaces (made up of thousands of hand-colored marks) insist on the under-valued sense of touch. Disrupting this surface, a deli-like ticket machine dispenses free artworks embossed with the alternating text “I can’t go on” or “I will go on.” Like life, these are for the taking. Such playfulness is humor masquerading as the super-ego – the super ego trying to make light of that which so terrifies the id that otherwise the poor psyche might completely self-destruct. Therein lies the work’s intangible poignancy, seamlessly aided by Franck’s haunting trek through snow.