My Ejector Seat (Upside down changes everything)

2006

Plywood, steel, calico, LD45FR, webbing, plastic, aluminium

Lifesize, dimensions variable (approx 120 x 170 x 240cm)

My Ejector Seat (Upside down changes everything) is a life sized plywood re-enactment of the pilot’s seat from a B-52 bomber. For more than fifty years the B-52 has been the mainstay of the US Air force. From Vietnam through Doctor Strangelove to Desert Storm, few objects better symbolise the unassailable military dominance of the west than the B-52. My interest however is in the ejector seat, which represents a point of vulnerability within this seemingly invulnerable machine. The ejector seat is an admission that nothing is invincible. My Ejector Seat is upside down. Its parachute is unfurled. It has clearly been 'deployed'. Something, somewhere has gone terribly wrong. In some ways this work is about inversions. Right side up, the ejector seat is like a throne - massive and imposing - but inverted it is no longer secure. It is still threatening, but it is the threat of falling over, collapsing. The paradox - or perhaps the hypocrisy - of the B-52 ejector seat is that it is about preserving a single life. In this machine - that so haphazardly kills in large round figures - are these little machines that are designed solely to protect a few, specific souls. So here we have another inversion; the idea of the B-52 ejector seat as a symbol of the import of an individual human life, albeit only a very select few. Ultimately, the vulnerability of these huge machines is their need to preserve these particular lives, and as such they are particularly vulnerable to those machines that follow no such doctrine. And so we return to My Ejector Seat, protruding from the gallery floor. The fate of its occupant is unclear. What is clear is that something mighty has fallen, but it is hard to be sure how we should feel about that.