Shift Your Position for Grace

Shift Your Position for Grace is a multi-media waiting room for Lorem Ipsum theatre company’s rendition of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. The exhibit takes on Ibsen’s work as an open text, allowing for local artists to bring their own interpretations to the script. The gallery offers a carefully constructed environment to engage the viewer during the time between performances and to add to people’s experience of the play.

The objects on view are inspired by Ghosts’ themes of marriage, containment, disease, and ideology. The exhibit responds to the debased, tragic ending of the story, driven by an awareness of unexplored alternatives, paths not taken, and openings that the characters were unable to find.

On display is hand-painted wallpaper interpreted from an image of the cell structure of Syphilis under a microscope. Folk paintings are hung in the spirit of the Norwegian tradition of decorative rosemaleing; and terrariums have been constructed symbolically with organic matter and rotting pomegranates.

The architectural elements — walls, roof, windows, doorway — reimagine the obstacles and weights by which the characters are obstructed and anchored. The video and sound elements imply things unseen in the production.

In these ways, the installation impresses in the viewer’s mind that they might also consider reasons to shift their perspective. It imposes a pressure upon the audience similar to the one Ibsen’s characters might have felt, immobilized by cultural circumstances and contained by social barriers. Wives stay and do their duty. Children are left in the dark. Audiences sit and watch. The exhibit suggests shifting your position for grace as a solution to the play’s dilemmas.