FLY

Installation: Tim Collins and Reiko Goto
Performance: Tim Collins and Matt Thayer
Fall Open House
Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA
1988

A collaborative project with project with Tim Collins, FLY was presented at the Headlands Center for the Arts. The Headlands has a long history as a base for military defense against airborne threats. The Headlands also functions as a stopover for hawks and birds of prey on their north south migrations. The history of flight is full of wonderful stories of fanciful dreamers and their designs for flying. These stories are usually tempered by immediate military interest upon any sign process. Our hope was to re-capture some of that feeling of magic and wonder which flight can inspire.

FLY consists of 25,000-30,000 flies, 470 mason jars, a large light-filled room and a screen door. The mason jars are laid out in a airplane like form. The day the project opened, we presented performance featuring Matt Thayer reading an original story about flight. When the audience was listening to his reading, they could hear the sound of a small airplane just above the building. Tim and I circled over head in a small plane for the performance.

“Reiko Goto and Tim Collins have installed a piece called “The Fly” that attempts to set the Headlands’ military background against its immemorial natural history. On the floor of a large empty room, they have set dozens of identical glass jars in a tight array that forms the shape of a decidedly pre-jet-age aircraft. More than it resembles an airplane, the figure suggests the shadow one might cast on the ground, a figure for the terror of air warfare and – once you know the jar’s contents – for the conflict of humanity and nature. The array has a shadowy quality because swatches of gray plastic screen cover the jars’ mouths. Inside the jars are the slowly hatching eggs of flies, permanent denizens of the area and (from our point of vie) age-old pests.”– Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic

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