Mounted at Lesley Heller Windowspace in the fall of 2026, The Synopticon and the Unsaid Self is a collaborative site-specific installation at Lesley Heller Windowspace that reinterprets a work originally created at Building 408B on Governors Island, NYC, during the artists’ 4 Heads Artist Residency in Fall 2022. The installation brings together two distinct but interconnected practices, exploring themes of identity, memory, time, and the nature of place.

Chung’s electronic devices echo the news soundbites that punctuated our “Last Year”, interpreted as the three years beginning with the onset the COVID pandemic. Rendered in Morse code on some devices, or letter-by-letter on an LED display, quotes that punctuated that period reflect a portrait of our collective identities. All together, they overwhelm us with a sense of urgency, but without a clear path forward. They are the cries for help that we see but can’t decipher, hear but can’t understand.

Walden uses the language of cartography as visual metaphors to explore ontology --  the metaphysical study of the nature of being. Each line is a representation of the moment it is drawn, each drawing a representation of the network of moments that define a state of being. He applies this language to the topology of the well-aged walls of 408B Colonels Row as a technique to draw out the space's identity, history, and its own state of being.

Together, the works reflect the unsettled period in which they were made, as the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying social upheavals reshaped our individual and collective experience. The installation considers how places, events, and memories accumulate over time, leaving traces that shape both our sense of self and our understanding of the world around us.