Fabric with rust, salt, ultramarine pigment, marble dust. Installation also includes glass containers, water, pigment and steel shelving.
An essay on the exhibit by Amanda Hamilton can be found here.
UnNamed Forms of Space and Matter is a site specific installation that explores the intersecting histories of 506 View Street in St. Paul.
Ten thousand years ago, 506 View Street in St. Paul was submerged under a vast river that drained the glacial melt from the last ice age, the water on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. This river, the predecessor to the Mississippi, carved the landscape in ways seen and unseen, shaping the natural and social worlds around it since. Currently at that site stands a stone church. Small by European standards, it is a regal, though americanized version of the churches known to the immigrant Irish railroad worker community that constructed it seventy years ago. As a result of changing demographics, the church has since been decommissioned and now sits as a vestige of this previous era, its imagery and symbolism adrift in a community that has changed around it
The interactions between these two historical points are the subject of UnNamed Forms of Space and Matter, a site-specific installation at 506 View Street. With imagery taken from three thousand years of world celestial charts and ultramarine blue pigment historically associated with images of the Madonna, the work explores the interconnected dynamics between these two perspectives.
The installation is comprised of more than 500 individual “artifacts,” remnants of chemical processes made by combining steel patterns with pigments and water on fabric, resulting in vivid and organic impressions in rust and fluid color. Embracing the random beauty and alchemical associations created by the interaction of these elements, the artifacts are simultaneously prints, paintings and relics of chemical processes, a collaborative interaction between artist and unpredictable natural forces. The installation interweaves these artifacts into the interior of the building, responding to these simultaneously divergent stories.
This work was made possible by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.