Michael Piazza
Among Piazza’s obsessions are bibliophilia, measurement, leg amputation, and imprisonment. This latter theme has become increasingly important since 1993, when he started collaborating with the inmates of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (formerly the Audy Home). In fact many of the pieces in the current exhibition are works in progress from that collaboration. These pieces will undoubtedly evolve over time, because change is central to Piazza’s working process: he constantly dismantles and reassembles objects and gives them new contexts or groups them differently, recycling the elements. The two massive law books that act as the weights in the barbell piece Ina-Way, for example, had a previous life as the wheels of a train advancing toward some broken crutches in the 1992 piece As Safe As Houses.
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The box of playing cards lies next to the squeegee. But Stol ‘N’ Cards is no ordinary pack: it was made with the help of the incarcerated youth in the Audy Home. Based on the traditional pack of cards and printed in an edition of 100, it has four suits: compasses, gym shoes, mugs, and moons, each complete with a jack (praying mantis), a queen (lioness), and a king (falcon). This piece was first exhibited in a one-night-only exhibition, “A Night in the Grand Court,” in July 1994, when the Audy Home was opened to the public for the first time in its 70-year existence. No doubt the cards contain a code, a secret language of the oppressed. And if the inmates made up a game, the rules must be known only to them.
