A permanently open window is Jason Dodge’s first permanent installation.

The project was conceived for an abandoned industrial space, now transformed into a commercial outlet, adjacent to the Maramotti Collection, in Reggio Emilia.

Realized in what was once the tower of a factory’s electrical power plant, the work consists of three elements: a permanently opened window at the summit of the tower (as an appropriation of everything that appertains to the air), two cedarwood doors sequentially in line with one another (as a double threshhold for a possible passage of bodies made of air), and a sculpture entitled Alphabet. The elements that constitute this tryptich supplant the high-voltage cables that once criss-crossed the tower, and they link with one another to construe a new and different order of space, no less than a new and different mode of perception.

The hidden lives of little things, of the often minimal utilitarian objects of which the work makes use, subtracted from their original functions, stand at the center of the practice of Jason Dodge: his works attempt to give new life to objects, and to generate new and personal experiences for the viewer, who thus becomes an active part of the artist’s work. Dodge here invites the viewer to encounter the work in a particularly performative way: in a process of approach and discovery in which the very place—which indeed is a “place” and not simply a “space”—that hosts the elements of the work that “inhabits” it tends to subvert the traditional modes of viewer perception and thus to involve the viewer in an experience of a new and different conception of significant form.

Traces of reflection on the meaning and import of this work are found in the poems “God of Rooms” by Jean Velentine, “The Fact of the Door Framed” by Adrienne Rich and “Alphabet” by Inger Christensen. Poetry is a language with which the artist is highly familiar, and with which he maintains a constant dialogue.

So, it is not by chance that the day of of the work’s inauguration foresees a conversation between Jason Dodge and Matthew Dickman, an American poet with whom the artist is developing a collaborative project.