Artist's Statement:
I have always wanted to make every room into its own world. I am constantly archiving and scavenging for my own past, and for signs of myself in the past as a whole. This room, the culmination of my four years at Bennington, is an attempt to combine these two impulses. Designed to combat the sterility of traditional archival reading rooms, Ruckus Room imagines a reading room where the archive spills out into every inch of the space. It is maximalist, colorful, and intricate. It is also my heart, turned inside out for you.
Recently, a classmate referred to my work as similar to the Japanese ritual of folding a thousand paper cranes; an act of repetition as remembrance and care. I repeat the faces and words of those who came before me almost obsessively; I am fascinated by what my hand can learn from replicating theirs. But mostly, I love this sentiment because I feel what I have learned at Bennington is how to manage my care. Like Sontag, I have an excess of tender feeling for the things I hold dear; here I have learned how to hold it within me, to express it to the best of my ability. I hope to spend the rest of my life continuing to figure out how I can fill rooms with my care, and allow people to sit alongside them for a while.
Thank you for sitting in my heart.
Lou Barcott
Lou Barcott
