Coke Wisdom O’Neal: Box

Coke Wisdom OʼNeal is a Brooklyn-based artist who works among and between the realms of photography, film, sculpture and performance. While most of his work ends up in the form of a photograph, OʼNeal continually examines and develops notions about ways in which photography relates to performance, theatre, stage sets and motion pictures. His Box is a monumental example of this. A “camera” is literally a room, and while photography tools and devices have shrunken in size since the early cameras that comprised an entire room, OʼNeal plays on the history of photographic devices by reinvigorating the idea of a room, or stage, within which to frame his subjects. Box at rest is a monumental sculpture operating along the lines of minimalist practice. Rather than creating an object to gaze upon, minimalist sculptures reorient architectural space, and reorient your body in space. When a subject enters Box, the work is further animated by the figure, which is both framed by Box and provided with a frame from which to see the world outside of Box. Box then transforms into a stage for what anthroplogist and sociologist Erving Goffman famously termed “the presentation of self in everyday space”. One cannot help but “perform” while in Box, as the heightened sense of awareness of “subjecthood” is framed and presented to the world outside of Box. Finally, OʼNealʼs photographs of subjects in Box are presented as his artwork in the world.

Coke O’Neal Didactics