Installation
Mirror, hooks, ABS plastic cut-outs, fluorescent lighting from the floor, glass shelving, snow domes, incandescent lighting and Sensormatic Euromax anti-theft gates. The viewer could manipulate the globes within a small perimeter, but if removed, the alarm system would sound.
Off the cuff, one could say of Reach out and touch someone that it is an installation dealing with the sense of touch, with our society’s nearly obsessive desire to communicate, and that it indirectly speaks to us of childhood — its playful aspect, and the dual taboo of touching (Didier Anzieu).
The theft-prevention setup is part of the installation’s concept . What is out of reach is not so much the objects themselves as what’s written on them: “to love,” “to be loved,” “to be in love,” those configurations of relationship that elicit so much desire and longing. In the installation itself, the spectator is located midway between two spaces — the intimate space of the sphere and the infinite “network” of the cabinet of mirrors —, visible yet physically inaccessible, because partly imaginary. Solicited by each of the devices in turn, the viewer cannot enter them.
