The mind needs a bath too just as the body needs a bath to be refreshed and renewed. In the tiny gallery space, Frederick Sausa created something like a mental bath room for ritual cleansing. The circle, representing both infinity and nothing, works like a soap for the brain. A space for “zoning out,” it is “attuned to the metaphysical bleakness but temporal” (Sausa). In here, time may expand or compress, or one may attain a state of no time. In this dead air, one can travel inner-space and confront the ennui that is always there.
Beyond nothing and the infinite, this exhibit is about boredom and the title is lifted from a quote, “Boredom: The Desire for Desires” found in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, declared “the greatest novel ever written” by Time magazine and “flawless as a work of art” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The novel, about a married socialite named Anna Karenina and her love affair with the wealthy Count Vronsky who grows bored with her and takes up painting, unaware that his art lacks passion and touch, runs about a thousand pages.
Inspired by sacred geometry and architecture and using ready-made and found objects as Sausa had done here, one may transform a small room into a time traveling device or an inner-spaceship to defy the gravity of boredom and find the essential lost in the great flood of information and the great muck of visual experience.
