Turnscope, 2001
Collaboration with Nick Tobier for the Green Street Gallery, Boston, MA.
“Installations come in all stripes, and frequently they deal with the physical space that they occupy. In this case, Ellen Driscoll and Nick Tobier have extended the reach of their work to include a hefty chunk of the surrounding neighborhood. The Gallery at Green St. is situated in a spcae adjacent to the Green Street Station MBTA stop on the Orange Line, a working-class Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The artists documented the neighborhood with photographs that were taken in a quarter-mile radius around the gallery–roughly the area Green St. services. The images are an eclectic blend of buildings, signs, houses and even graffiti and litter. Gallery visitors…can push a wooden turnstile that spins like a subway gate. The turnstile drives..a wheel, and the axle, which passes through a wall, turns another large pinwheel type construction on the other side of the wall. The photographs of the neighborhood ..are mounted on the pinwheel’s outer edge…One can make numerous associations between “Turnscope” and the world outside the gallery; the turn-styles in Green Street Station below the street; the wheels of subway cars; the circular shape of subway tunnels. Commuting also brings to mind the circular pattern of one’s travels–leaving on the day’s journey and retracing one’s footsteps on the trip home. “Turnscope” lets viewers consider the space that the piece inhabits, and sense how the gallery is connected with the area outside of the building’s walls.” from Turnscope review in the Boston Globe, January 2001
