00:00 [Background noise]
00:25 [Background noise]
00:30 Do you hear music? I do, I hear music.
00:34 Hello. Welcome.
00:36 [Background noise]
00:42 Hi, my name is Rodney. Nice to meet you. Where are you from?
00:46 Germany. Oh yeah? I live in Mainz.
00:49 You live in Mainz, yeah?
00:51 [Background noise]
01:03 So, welcome to the transport.
01:06 This is my vision of displacement and these neutral zones that we go through when we travel.
01:16 So, going from one point to the next, there's this time that we are in transit, right?
01:22 Whether it's the train or the plane or the automobile, right?
01:25 There are times where we are confined into these contained spaces.
01:30 That's the interior environment space that I've created here to recreate that architecture of transport.
01:38 And the video shows these different applications of how we transport ourselves throughout these various social environments.
01:49 The airports, these subcultures that we go through every day, right?
01:53 The hotel lobbies and these things.
01:57 So, this actually is in Frankfurt at this beautiful Riem Koolhaas at the regional Bahn station in Frankfurt airport.
02:11 And the ICE will be kind of cruising by here.
02:15 It's also about my work, the philosophy of this particular work, this series, is also about being lost.
02:23 And that time where we kind of don't know whether to go left or right, so we go left and we're supposed to go right.
02:28 So, we kind of make these circles and find our place eventually.
02:33 So, it's about displacement, about being lost, but it's also about the joy of being lost because that's actually the most fun.
02:42 It's not the end journey, often.
02:46 It's the getting there.
02:50 So, as you see, I couldn't have orchestrated this any better.
02:55 The woman goes in, the man comes out, looking which way to go, looks left, goes right.
03:02 Someone else going in, doors close.
03:06 Off to the next city.
03:11 This actually is in the Frankfurt airport as well.
03:14 This beautiful typography, this lit floor, and showing the journey, walking through this typography of the city.
03:27 Very symbolic through that application of shadow.
03:31 And working with this negative reverse in the camera, with this series,
03:37 kind of makes a context to Cavallano, the Italian writer who talks about these invisible cities.
03:44 So, with the camera, I make these inverted reverse negative imagery, which distorts the reality, but yet it all seems so similar.
03:59 Very nice drawing.
04:00 Oh, thanks.
04:01 Impressed?
04:02 Oh, thanks.
04:03 It's a lot of fun.
04:04 Thank you very much.
04:06 How did you get to Germany?
04:09 Your wife is German?
04:12 Well, no, she's not.
04:14 No?
04:15 No, she has a special assignment over in Frankfurt.
04:18 Oh, okay.
04:19 Working at Star Alliance, which is based out of Frankfurt.
04:24 And we found the great village of Mainz, actually.
04:29 So, it's about a three to four year stay we'll be there.
04:34 And her German is very fluent, of course.
04:37 Of course, I was open as an artist to go and experience and stretch out.
04:44 It's so close to great places like Basel.
04:48 You're often in Basel?
04:50 I've gone there, yeah, sure.
04:52 Yeah?
04:53 Yeah, absolutely.
04:54 What do you like about this city?
04:56 I like the art.
04:58 It seems to really support the art and the people seem to be very excited about that.
05:03 The architecture, of course.
05:05 It's all good.
05:08 Am I allowed to publish this?
05:11 Please do.
05:12 Because the people of Basel will be very grateful and very happy.
05:17 Oh, yeah.
05:18 And we'll see you next time in Basel.
05:20 You're in Basel also, at the fair?
05:23 I don't know if Julie's going to include me in the Basel fair.
05:26 But she went to the Cologne fair.
05:30 So, could be.
05:32 It could be a trans park in Basel.
05:34 That would be very nice.
05:37 Yeah.
05:38 I'm into creating this, so I'm very tired as well.
05:41 Oh, yeah.
05:44 This is all just very simple, you know, because you can't be drilling into the hotel rooms.
05:51 Construction of things also.
05:53 And with the very readily, kind of Joseph Boisi kind of like concept or philosophy of
06:00 using these kind of readily available materials.
06:03 This is construction material.
06:05 You know, this is copper tubing that you can buy at the lumber store.
06:09 So, it's all purchased here in New York at the hardware store, basically.
06:15 So, I think you made a plan for us.
06:17 Oh, absolutely.
06:19 It's hard to realize the whole setup.
06:27 And trying to incorporate music and certain aromas.
06:32 Trying to make a sensory, you know, sensory pod is what I call it.
06:37 So, and all sensories.
06:39 Smell, sight, physicality of being in a different space, right?
06:45 Displacing you from the hotel for a moment, right?
06:48 Putting you into this neutral zone.
06:50 This time when you go from point A to point B.
06:52 So, you feel like you're on a journey somewhere.
06:55 You walk out, you go, "Oh, yeah, I'm in a hotel."
06:57 For a minute, I was in the Frankfurt airport.
06:59 Or these ambiguous, very, these spaces are actually, you know, not any one place.
07:07 It can be many places, any place.
07:10 Anybody who's traveling, you know, who hasn't in our world, right?
07:14 It really mixes up the places.
07:16 At the end, you don't know where you are, how it has been applied.
07:20 It's just how you can, I don't know.
07:23 It was back in the '80s.
07:25 All the guys, some of the guys, breakfast the first month, first Saturday night in the gallery.
07:31 There's just people who knew.
07:33 And it was great because critics, artists, and anger artists were just not talking.
07:40 It just was shimmering.
07:44 [Indistinct chatter]
