10 Apr To Be Among Friends: Desire, Containment, and Communion in the Space Between Floors at Grand Central Art Center
By Tyler Stallings
At the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, the mundane elevator is transformed into a liminal chamber of longing in To Be Among Friends, a collaboration between artist and sound designer Joshua-Michéle Ross and typographic textile artist Hope Meng, and curated by GCAC Director/Senior curator, John Spiak. As part of a continuation from Ross’s earlier virtual performance The Adjacent Possible, this immersive installation is both a time capsule and a collective exhale. Over a thousand desires—gathered from 37 countries during the height of the pandemic—are stitched into the quilted fabric that lines the elevator’s walls, forming a soft cocoon of communal yearning. From the moment the elevator doors open, viewers are invited into a tender, introspective environment suspended between memory and hope, grief and intimacy.
Elevators are rarely considered spaces for contemplation. Their architectural and mechanical role is clear: they enabled the rise of the skyscraper, and with it, the modern city. But culturally, elevators have also become charged with emotional and narrative potential. They are tiny stages for sudden intimacy, unscripted encounters, confessions, and confrontations. In cinema and television, elevators often trap characters together—emotionally as well as physically. They collapse hierarchical space (the boss and the intern become equals for ten floors), and temporal space (a moment can stretch into a revelation). Think of Mad Men’s elevator scenes—charged with ambition and subtext—or any number of horror films where the elevator is a site of claustrophobia and dread.
To Be Among Friends builds on this layered history. It turns the elevator into an affective vessel, lined with fabric that resembles both a nomadic tent and a womb. Entering this space is not simply a vertical journey—it’s an invitation to step into a suspended psychological and temporal zone. The phrases stitched into the textile walls range from whimsical (“banana ice cream”) to mournful (“to speak to my grandfather once more”), from political (“peace in Ukraine”) to sensuous (“orgasm, as usual”). They are presented without hierarchy, a tapestry of human longing democratized by the collective experience of isolation and shared vulnerability.
The choice of an elevator as the project’s site is more than clever—it’s crucial. Like the pandemic lockdowns that inspired this project, elevators are enclosed, transient spaces with prescribed limits. You enter and wait. You don’t linger. But here, the artists ask you to pause, to notice the intimacy of being enclosed with the thoughts of strangers. It becomes a radical act of listening, even without sound. Ross’s accompanying three-hour sound piece, looping the desires in gentle cadence, is reminiscent of being in the womb—hearing the murmur of voices through a fluid medium, distant but comforting. The physical structure evokes the shape of a uterus, reinforcing the sense that we are suspended in time, awaiting a kind of rebirth.
When the elevator doors eventually open, we are reintroduced to the world—perhaps a little changed, perhaps reminded of what matters. As Ross notes, elevators are transitional by nature. They don’t belong to a single place, but to movement. In this sense, To Be Among Friends is not just about revisiting pandemic-era loss and desire, but about moving through it—metaphorically and literally. The transformation from isolation to renewed connection is not complete, but it is in process.
This project also enters into dialogue with earlier artworks that have used the elevator as both a conceptual device and a physical site, rich with psychological and cultural symbolism. For The Office: An Art Space, a gallery based in Huntington Beach, ran by Chris Hoff, who then started OC Art Blog, I curated an exhibition in 2004 that included artist Carrie Paterson’s simulated elevator cab, Speculative Architecture #2: Elevator, that explored fear culture, the mythology of class mobility, and the looming specter of disaster. Other artists who found the elevator space intriguing include Maurizio Cattelan in which presented a miniature working elevator that opened onto a blank wall—an absurdist gesture that poked fun at institutional systems and the illusion of upward advancement. Barbara Kruger, in her LACMA elevator intervention, wrapped the interior and exterior with commanding text, using the space as a critique of consumerism and power. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have included elevators in their immersive sound works, using them to destabilize time and space and heighten psychological tension. Do Ho Suh has recreated elevator interiors in translucent fabric, turning these transitional spaces into ghostly memory-traces of former homes and institutions. Stephen Vitiello transformed an elevator shaft into a resonant sound chamber in Elevator Music 6, reimagining its vertical function as an immersive acoustic experience. Across these diverse practices, the elevator emerges as a site of stasis and motion, vulnerability and power—an evocative lineage into which To Be Among Friends meaningfully inserts itself.
Ross and Meng’s approach is more intimate and communal, but similarly concerned with the in-between: the in-between of public and private, individual and collective, movement and stillness. To Be Among Friends reclaims the elevator as a site of emotional depth and plurality.
The title itself, To Be Among Friends, echoes this intent. These stitched phrases, though anonymous, become familiar. Their hopes and cravings are ours—or close enough to make us pause. In a moment when many still feel the psychic residue of the pandemic’s isolations, the installation reawakens the ache and the wonder of what it means to be together, even briefly, in a shared space. That the space is so often considered transitional only sharpens its poignancy. Here, the elevator becomes sacred.
Hope Meng’s typographic fabric compositions are central to the installation’s power. Her choice to render the desires in a variety of typefaces subtly conveys the diversity of voices and rhythms behind them. It’s a visual score, a polyphony of fonts that echo different accents and cadences. Each phrase, short as it may be, carries a fullness of personality—“warm feet” lands with the same weight as “the 25th amendment” or “to float above the city, as snow does.” The typography invites the eye to wander, to linger, to read not only text but subtext, form, texture.
The genius of this project lies in its restraint. It doesn’t ask you to decode a message or solve a riddle. It asks you to feel. As the pandemic exposed our vulnerability, it also reminded us of our common humanity. These desires—mundane, ecstatic, political, bodily—reveal the wide range of what we yearn for when faced with mortality and stillness. To gather them inside an elevator, and to let us drift through them inside a softly lit capsule, is to offer a moment of collective exhale. It is also, in a modest but profound way, to make art that listens.
To Be Among Friends may be fleeting—the ride lasts only so long—but its resonance lingers. It reminds us that even the most overlooked spaces can become thresholds for memory, transformation, and yes, intimacy. In the elevator, we are always on the way somewhere else. But for a moment, in this installation, we are exactly where we need to be.
Joshua-Michele Ross and Hope Meng: To Be Among Friends
April 5 – August 10, 2025
Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway
Santa Ana, CA 92701
Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Southern California. With over 30 years of experience, he has contributed to and edited numerous books and catalogs, offering insightful scholarship in contemporary art. To learn more about his work, visit www.tylerstallings.com.
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