In Thy Myopia of Desire artist Jamie Funk offers a meditation on how we experience (read: do the dance of) desire within the readymade parameters of space, control, and proximity.

This work, a durational performance piece with an interactive sculptural installation and accompanying multi-channel video projection, explores the dynamics of power exchange between the lover and the one whom the lover desires. The piece reveals the process of the desired body becoming trapped, leading to sensations, real or imagined, of capture myopathy.

During the space of six hours each day for three consecutive days, Funk will lay on a bed of nails that may be rotated by members of the audience/participants of the piece. This rotation implicates the “viewer” (as they must physically rotate the bed via handles on either end of it) and represents the cyclical nature of power dynamics and exchange in the lover/desired dichotomy.

 Altering perceptions of proximity, space and control, the bed of nails holds one at a distance, thereby functioning as a barrier to the desire of the gaze that never reaches its destination. Physical distance may, however, be overcome (here via rotation), but emotional proximity remains noticeably, at times comfortably, absent. In laying on the bed of nails, Funk’s lack of physical distance from the nails and those controlling the rotation of the bed they rest upon does not create their embedding within her; rather, the displacement of pressure caused by the closeness and multitude of the nails makes their impact upon Funk’s flesh negligible, unnoticeable.