Megan and Murray McMillan

Our next project, ChannelBone, is a video installation which opens on Friday, April 6 at White Flag Projects. The show will only be on view for two days, but it’s a huge project nevertheless. The video portion is finished, so for the next two weeks, Murray and I are working on the large scale, ceiling-mounted installation that will hold the video.

The installation will be a large wood and plastic construction, suspended from White Flag’s steel ceiling beams. The video, placed inside the structure, is an exploration of life experiences that both create divisions and yet, paradoxically provide a new kind of conduit: a passage that was not there before.

The term “channel bone” comes from two sources: Ovid uses it in the Metamorphoses to describe the neck or windpipe, and it is used in the Bible, in Job 31:22, as a tube or a shaft. In our work, it will refer to the multiple meanings of a “channel”— as a technological, communicative, and geological term.

The imagery of bones, particularly the customary museum-mounted exhibition of whale skeletons suspended from ceilings, is central to the concept of the piece. Traditionally, whales have been used as a narrative device for transformation. From Pinocchio to Jonah to Moby Dick, the whale is a vehicle that both physically and metaphysically transports a character to a new destination — in a way, working as a channel between two states of being.