15 October 2005 14:54 PM

Treadmills are perhaps the machine of our times: expensive and solitary, they artificially propel the body nowhere but to a state of loss, at least of lost weight. From this generator of negation Liza McConnell has reconstructed something positive and downright wondrous, a machine that actually takes you somewhere while you walk, a place magical and luminous—and real. Hidden inside the bowels of a modified treadmill lives a diorama of a highway; the viewer’s physical exertions turn the treadmill, which turns the bike cranks, which turn the diorama inside the traffic cone, which creates a real-time moving image into which the viewer wanders, body and soul charmed.

—Lori Waxman