Portal
Portal, installation view, Xerox prints, red neon tube, wood frame: 89.5 × 192 cm.
While visiting abandoned apartments in Weimar I found a door that had been papered over for decades. Years of neglect and moisture had peeled the wallpaper back, uncovering it. I made several photographs in the apartment and built this installation from what I saw there.
For the installation I cut a rectangle out of the gallery wall and set a Xerox print into the opening, framed in wood so the image sits recessed inside the wall instead of hung on it. A red neon tube leans diagonally across the print. The photograph is of the papered-over door, which is itself still closed. The picture of a hidden doorway becomes another hidden doorway, set back into a wall the same way the original was. Whatever is behind it stays behind it.
Source photograph of the wallpapered-over door, abandoned apartment, Weimar.
The neon is lit. Red light comes off the glass tube and washes across the Xerox print, catching the torn edge of the wallpaper and the dark gap behind it. The frame sets the image back into the wall, and the cord along the floor makes clear the piece has been switched on. The door in the photograph is still shut, but lit like this it looks like a way through.
Portal 001, lights on
Brian Bixby, 2017
Xerox prints, cardboard, neon tube, wood frame
131.5 × 216.5 cm