Suite U-234, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, 2005
Suite U-234, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, 2005
Suite U-234, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, 2005
Suite U-234, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, 2005
Suite U-234, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, 2005
Suite U-234, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, 2005
Exhibited at Guild and Greyshkul Gallery in New York, this installation centered on an octagonal space ship control pod wrapped in aluminum foil with "Suite U234" stenciled on its side—referencing the last Nazi U-boat purportedly captured by the Allies. Inside, control panels displayed numbers and dials whose metrics have been replaced with poetry and unusable elements. The phone line led nowhere, and none of the controls connected to anything functional. Created while preoccupied with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, a looping video titled Nuclear Suite played on the inside opposite the control panels, splicing scenes from both films to track astronauts alongside Solaris's protagonist Chris Kelvin as he investigated odd phenomena aboard the space station. Through this work, Raskin continued their exploration of the isolated hero/individual freefloating in a hermetically sealed space contending with the limits of their own imagination and psyche.