Sisyphus

SISYPHUS – was originally created for the 1991 exhibition “Candyass Carnival” at Stux Gallery in New York City, featuring the work of Cary Leibowitz and friends. The video draws on two sources to depict futility and hope, as well as observations about language: the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a mortal who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to have it roll down again; and phonetic peculiarities in the English language. In the video, Sisyphus is spelled seventy-two different ways, one name per frame, but never correctly. There may not be another word which has so many possible spellings. Each failed iteration is accompanied by a drum roll followed by a ta-da, reflecting the descending trajectory of the rolling stone. Since its inception in 1991, Sisyphus has been presented in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions and was mastered onto DVD and published in 2011 by Barbara Krakow Gallery as an edition of 100.