Jessie Stead

A “Spacer” is a generic term for lamp making parts, specifically elements with a center hole, used to obscure a light source’s wires while simultaneously creating a designed “space” supporting the illumination.

A gathering of figurative “Spacers”, decorative anachronistic idealizations of youth barely passing as the otherworldly, have been collected from cheap broken lamps and chandeliers and unwittingly re-employed in an exhibition littered with the cryptology of a disembodied screenplay page and preoccupied by the rhythms of an artist’s junk mail.

Supporting actors with a hollow center, the Spacers hang out in sparse, draped clothing. Some of them have grapes. Lacking motivation for their performative labor as cinematic furniture, the screenplay attempts justification through fictional history (at least place and time). They wake up somewhere known as the Compression Grotto, adorned with near obsolete (but prismatic) technology.

As they loop in a broken movie, averages of pipe dreams unsure how best to be recycled protagonists, the Spacers hazily remember that time when they used to be just lamps.

—Jessie Stead, 2019