Live action with architectural object, 51:00, 2024

Grayscale is a large-scale performance-cum-sculpture that began as a response to Gutai artist Murakami Saburo’s 1956 work Passing Through. Locke created a freestanding rectangular structure out of lumber, drywall, and paint; taking advantage of the gallery’s lighting conditions and responding to its architecture, the structure stretches from near the gallery’s front windows to its rear alcove, evoking both the monolith of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bruce Nauman’s 1969 work Performance Corridor. At the exhibition’s opening the artist activated the structure over the course of a roughly 40-minute performance, bashing a three and a half by two-foot hole with a hammer in the four-foot-wide wall nearest the gallery’s windows, uncovering a four by four-foot interior room. Stepping into this first room, the artist created a second hole and entered a second interior room; the artist repeated this action a total of six times until she reached the final room at the rear of the structure. The artist then painted the rear-most interior wall with pitch black paint, reversed into the volume’s prior chamber, and painted its interior wall a deep gray. The artist repeated this pattern of backing into and painting rooms progressively lighter shades of gray, exited the structure, and turned off the gallery’s interior lights, revealing a long interior tunnel or black hole that appears to extend into endless dark. Grayscale remains on view for the run of the exhibition under natural light, its contours and depths changing with the varying light conditions of Spring. –Grant Wahlquist