P. Staff: Possessive

The installation takes as its departure point the gallery space at East 69th Street, a former residence located in the Upper East Side neighborhood. At the core of the townhome, a looped film casting a silhouette of a shirtless, tattooed figure is projected across three stories onto the central column. Standing still, he inhales and exhales, his chest rising and falling with each breath. A bright green laser beam penetrates the figure’s gut, ambiguously signaling an act of insertion or extraction—also perhaps delineating a body under surveillance or siege. The ambient soundscape likewise transmits an uneasy yet intimate confluence of inside and outside: uneven breathing, the pulse of a beating heart, muffled conversation, and the dampened atonal clang of broken piano keys.

Complementing the cool dark-blue image of the video projection, the interiors of the gallery are suffused with Staff’s signature yellow luminescence—here, a light meant to evoke the somber, high-intensity glow of sodium-vapor streetlamps. The surfaces within are saturated with this monochromatic layer, which suggests processes or infirmities particular to animal bodies—the bilic, the urinary, the jaundiced—as well as rays of sunshine, the toxic glow of nuclear fallout, or the poisonous hue of arsenic.

Unique sculptures are installed within each discrete gallery space, translucent gray latex stretched and folded over spiky armatures. Their slick, tensile surfaces suggest bodies clothed in tight-fitting fetish gear or BDSM scenes of vacuum-sealing immobilization. For the framework of each sculpture, Staff joins the aggregate dimensions of the townhome’s architectural elements—bookcases, stairwells, and doorways, among others.  
 
Metastasizing the orderly measurements of the building, these objects visualize the sensation of an aberrant anatomical structure trying to escape its own bones, of unruly limbs attempting to burst through skin, of gasping and halted breath.