The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment

"Fiehn and Myers, palookas who seem to imagine they're in toe shoes, combine Goat Island's pedestrian repetition and Lucky Pierre's guileless clowning with Beckettian inertia; ...attempts to wrest profundity from their cardboard set prove endearingly futile until their world collapses in a coup de theatre of rare sublimity." -The Chicago Reader

Mixing basic materials with homespun engineering, Chicago-based duo (and Nuffield international artists in residence) Cupola Bobber tinker with reality by creating performance that hangs between staged theatrics and the utterly familiar.

With an eye on vaudeville, the night sky, and this note: "If I die, my knowledge may die with me", this show investigates distance - both real and felt - while considering what it is to look at the night sky. Texts are sent to them on paper scrolls descending from the ceiling, texts that explore themes of distance-conquering: the first North American transcontinental railroad, Kennedy's speech declaring his goal of going to the moon, the Golden Record loaded onto the Voyager spacecraft and shot at the stars on a 50,000 year mission.

Spending much of the performance stuck together, Fiehn laying on Myers' back, the two struggle in earnest to make it through, to continue on together, searching for a way to conquer their own distance. They make it through by finally achieving height, perspective, and seeing what's possible again for the first time; in the kind of beauty that makes you sigh.

With an eye on vaudeville, the night sky, and this note: "If I die, my knowledge may die with me"*, TMWPSFHA investigates the stars, the railroad, and our memories in a struggle to pinpoint something infinitely satisfying. Imagining the possibilities implied by the sudden conquering of space through Buster Keaton's lens (a transcontinental railroad, a man on the moon, a railroad built to the stars), and building a universe (room) out of cardboard, we discover a beautiful moment built like a monument.

By mixing basic materials with homespun engineering, the duo tinker with reality by creating imagery that hangs between staged theatrics and the utterly familiar. Using an intricate tensely present web of lo-fi mechanics, they will covert a confined interior into an expansive nightscape, a universe out of cardboard. Height is something they achieve, breaking free, defying gravity to feel something new, different... to feel progress.

The narrative is there, the space changes, tasks flow into each other, the light goes from bright to twilight, to night, and stars dancing together, dialogue that finds meaning in the dozens of connecting threads left on the fringe of it's intention, and resolution in the kind of beauty that makes you sigh.

"The mind expects, and attends, and remembers, so that what it expects passes by way of what it attends to into what it remembers. Yet our attention does endure, and through our attention what is still to be makes its way into the state where it is no more." [St. Augustine, The Confessions]

*Simons, Sarah. No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again, Letters To The Mount Wilson Observatory, Los Angeles, Society For the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 1993