Rising from the floor atop a crusty old boat propeller, THE DISSOCIATION OF WATER. -or- WHY THE SEA SOBS, like all my pieces, eschews a linear narrative to evoke a fragmentary dream-like state. Evocative, perhaps, of what a diver might see when floating through an aged shipwreck, the viewer peeks through two lenses in the front of a dusty old crate at the briny museum within. In the large opening a mermaid floats, porcelain doll head perched through flowing lace on the body of a devilfish. Thistles gather below her, while behind are arranged the windowed displays of a lost 'Wunderkammern'. To our right a panel of 19th-century pressed seaweed drifts in a bath of saturated red light. The small opening in the front of the piece gives a clear view of another one of these diaramas: an Asian mask grins through a carpet of cicada casings milling in frozen activity on a tattered fabric.

Note: This piece was dismantled and reconfigured in 1999.