Echoing the Biblical Latin phrase Noli me tangere — “touch me not” — artist Joseph La Piana’s site-specific installation, Look, But Don’t Touch evinces the current state of “visible separation” which the individual encounters in society today — an ontology of self-hood defined by an increased virtual presence which is matched only by the ongoing withdrawal of embodied experience.
A free-standing installation comprised of stacked glass “rooms”— with each room a different color — Look, But Don’t Touch is intended to be an embodied, sensorial experience for the participant interacting with it. Travelling through multiple rooms of different hues, while also able to see the outside world and others inside the installation, the intended effect is at once to illicit a sense of lucidity as well as confusion. Like the Biblical origin story of the Tower of Babel, La Piana’s structure is a self-contained world that unites the inhabitants while also simultaneously foregrounding with its partitioned and colored rooms, their solitary, alien status.
Importantly, with Look, But Don’t Touch, La Piana envisioned the installation’s rooms as three-dimensional realizations of his two dimensional “Subfractal” paintings. Imaging the composition of a painting as, in essence, a “floorplan,” a paintings various color fields, or quadrants, are transformed into the installation’s rooms — with the respective room color attributed to the source painting. For La Piana, the referential use of his paintings as “floorplans,” combined with the integration of their attributed colors, reflects a deeper thematic current within his creative practice, one that establishes a continuum with all of the pieces he creates, each related to the other as a singular, total body of work employing recursive strategies that reference prior pieces in the creation of new ones.