Coney Night Maze is a complex mixed-media sculptural installation with sound which draws inspiration from the maze of layered fences, gates, ramps and barriers that were nestled among the I-beams and columns on the underside of the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. Approximately 14 feet in height and set in darkness, Coney, with its white painted maze, hovering Cyclone structure, and dimly lit rows of bare bulbs, is meant to evoke a phantasmagorical nocturnal structure. On one side an ascending track vanishes into darkness and then is found again, descending in the distance to skim the edge of a rough rock wall that runs the twenty-seven foot length of the work. From time to time a car is faintly heard, traveling on a distant track.
My work, starting with the early "Hotels" and "Tourist Cabins", has always been about stopping places, points of passage on a metaphorical journey through life. Begun in 1997, Coney Night Maze is my 9/11 piece. It is also about mortality. This is my first work in which one can see the whole track, the whole road, the end of the journey in sight.
Donna Dennis, 2014