Give Me Shelter

Give Me Shelter is composed of an endless replacebale stack gold emergency blankets. These blankets are otherwise known as the original “Space Blanket” and used to fend off hypothermia. While micro-thin and light-weight, each individual blanket looks in likeness to a solid sheet of metal. It is suggestive of the gold bullion sealed in the vaults below the Federal Reserve in Lower Manhattan. It both appears to bear weight and significance, however its real utility remains in its weightlessness, portability, and sheerness again the elements. Accordingly visitors are invited to take a blanket as needed or desired, with replacement blankets filling in the stack to its original number at the end of each day. This kind of engagement with the public is pointedly indebted to the posters and candy piles of Felix Gonzales Torres. Like these works this piece is evocative of earlier precedents in minimalist sculpture but equally preferences a social contract. The emergency blanket speaks to the needs of shelter, both in the recent Occupy movement and the housing crisis of the past several years. This offering hopes to create a tension between the formal pleasure and material suggestiveness of the gold stack and its alternative value as a life saving fabric against the most primary obstacles.

Give Me Shelter has had multiple exhibitions, performances, and iterations from 2012-2016.