On: A three-part immersive text installation exploring archetypes, memory, and perception.

OVERVIEW

On is a series of three ten-minute looping installations — On: Archetypes, On: Memory, and On: Perception — each designed to surround the viewer with cycling, ritual-like text across a three-wall projected environment. Written in the register of a truism (after Jenny Holzer) but structured as mythic, chant-like incantation, the work explores what it means to be a self shaped by collective history, inherited memory, and constructed perception.

Each piece functions as a standalone experience and does not require sequential viewing — visitors can enter and exit at will, encountering the work mid-cycle, and can experience one, two, or all three rooms. Together, the trilogy moves from comfort into unease into confrontation: Archetypes is mythic and consoling, Memory is bodily and uncanny, Perception is fractured and urgent. Viewers are meant to leave not with resolution, but with a live, unresolved awareness of their own experience in the world.

On began as a zine series and has since been adapted for spatial, durational, immersive presentation — evolving from the page into architecture, light, and time.

THE EXPERIENCE

Visitors enter a darkened room where projected text cycles across three walls in white type on a deep maroon field — a color chosen for its bodily associations (blood, earth, womb) rather than the coldness of black-void projection. Text fades and blurs in and out word by word, never scrolling aggressively, always dissolving. Some sequences move across all three walls in synchrony; others travel from wall to wall, meeting at the corners of the room. Visitors are free to move, sit, or stand, and to enter the space from any point in the loop.

The language itself operates through repetition, litany, direct address, and unresolved paradox — never explaining itself, always performing its subject rather than describing it.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

On: Archetypes is the first installment in the On trilogy and its most consoling register — a ten-minute meditation on the idea that nothing experienced by a single person is, in fact, singular.

The piece begins from a simple provocation: that identity, as we tend to construct it, depends on a myth of uniqueness — the belief that our joys, griefs, and failures belong to us alone, and that this ownership is what makes a life meaningful. Archetypes works to dismantle that myth, then insists on something larger in its place. Every emotion named in the piece's central litany — happiness, grief, betrayal, ecstasy — is stated as shared, not personal: not diminished by that fact, but connected to something ancestral, cyclical, and continuous.

Formally, the piece draws on the tone of the truism (after Jenny Holzer) — declarative, unadorned, aphoristic — but stretches it into something closer to incantation or liturgy. Phrases repeat, accumulate, and return with slight variation, echoing the way myth and ritual language have always worked: not to argue a point, but to induce a state. The viewer is not asked to agree or disagree with any single line; they are asked to stand inside language that behaves like memory itself — cyclical, inherited, only partially theirs.

This inquiry sits at the center of my broader practice: an interest in phenomenology, liminality, and the ontological instability of the self — how much of what we call "mine" is actually given to us by lineage, culture, and pattern. Archetypes asks the viewer to hold two truths at once, without resolving the tension between them: that they are not unique, and that this very fact is what connects them to something divine.

On: Archetypes is designed to loop continuously, allowing visitors to enter and exit the experience at any point, encountering the piece mid-thought rather than at a fixed beginning. This structure is intentional: the work does not have a first or last line, because its subject — the shared, repeating nature of human experience — does not either.

Clip from On: Archetypes

Textural reference for On: Archetypes

Visual reference: Jenny Holzer exhibition ‘the whole truth’ hosted at bergamo’s palazzo della ragione. Photo credit: designboom

INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS

  • A dedicated room, ideally 12–20 ft per wall, with three walls suitable for projection (a fourth wall serves as entrance/threshold)

  • Three projectors (synced playback across three channels), one media player/computer running looped video, basic sound system (2–4 speakers, ideally positioned for immersive/corner placement)

  • Room should be capable of near-total blackout during operation

  • Each piece runs 10 minutes, looping continuously

  • Designed for open, unscheduled viewing — visitors may enter/exit at any point in the loop

  • The work can be shown as a single piece (one room), or as a full trilogy (if multi-room space is available). A smaller-format version (single wall) is also in development for spaces without three-wall capacity.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I’m a designer, writer and interdisciplinary artist working across text, installation, and image. My practice is rooted in phenomenology, liminality, and the ontological question of what constitutes a self — how much of what we call "ours" (memory, perception, identity, archetype) is inherited, constructed, or shared rather than singular. I am drawn to the divine not as doctrine but as a register: the mythic, ritual, incantatory mode of address that lets language do more than describe — it can perform, invoke, confront. On extends my chapbook and zine work — spare, ritualistic, image-driven language — into immersive, durational installation, treating architecture, darkness, and time as the final materials of composition, and the viewer's own body as the site where the work completes itself. I hold a BFA in Text + Media from Florida State University and am currently developing On toward its first full installation, with residency support at Can Serrat International Artist Residency (El Bruc, Catalonia, Oct–Nov 2026).

CONTACT

I'm currently seeking galleries, curators, and alternative spaces to present On — as a single piece, a two-room pairing, or the full trilogy.

For inquiries, collaborations, or to discuss adapting the work to your space, get in touch: BIGGSALLI25@GMAIL.COM