About the work

The duck is monumental, a relic of some forgotten civic project, but it feels like the charade players are the true monument here. Their precarious perch, the almost-fall into the splashing water, suggests a moment of pure, unselfconscious performance. Perhaps the mandolin case, so stiff and new, is the only thing not fully committed to this transient joy; its emptiness a quiet aspiration to a different kind of sound. It sits there, a promise unfulfilled, while the body language of the players makes the plaza itself feel like a stage. The pigeon, though, seems to know something the others don't, lost in its own immediate world, indifferent to human folly and dreams. Meaning often arises in the space between what we perform and what we merely are.