This October 3-7 I will install a new project, Secular
Columbarium for the Island, at the (e)merge art fair in the Capitol
Skyline Hotel. When I saw the call for on-site projects, I knew I
wanted to create a work that was connected somehow to Southwest DC, where
the hotel is located. The
installation I am creating is what I call a "mythologization" of
Southwest (known in the nineteenth century as “the Island”). My project is a way to create an
experience inside the fair that connects viewers to the surrounding community
and neighborhoods.
A
columbarium is a chamber housing
urns holding the remains of the deceased, built to meet the demand of the
recently departed or long gone.
Though public spaces, columbariums house intimate statements and private
gestures. They often contain
snapshots, record covers, drawings, teddy bears, statues, toys, and other
keepsakes and obsessions of a life past.
Each niche in the columbarium is a tiny room, a stage upon which the
deceased continue to perform their "last words" through objects and
gestures.
In
Secular Columbarium for The Island,
I propose to create an imagined memorial, in which objects from Southwest's
recent and distant history reflect the neighborhoods's past, present, (and
future?). Like in a traditional
columbarium, the objects both commemorate and reanimate a (lost) feeling,
experience, or life. Southwest is
a neighborhood with a rich history, but also a vibrant present and an uncertain
future (of which the Capitol Skyline Hotel and (e)merge are a part).
The
installation will consist of a wood framework of boxes housing a
diverse selection of objects relating to the history of Southwest that I find, collect, and create–novels, advertisements, newspapers, snapshots,
consumer goods, packaging, and architectural drawings. The tiny rooms in the columbarium act
as invitations or mini-exhibitions in themselves, dioramas about death and the
future. The goal is not to recreate what has passed, in nostalgic form, but to
imagine a new mythology about a place that is very much present. Like many others who will attend the
fair, I am not familiar with Southwest; the items that will fill the
columbarium are created in
mind from content gleaned online and through archival research, enmeshed with
my own fantasies of the place.
Information about (e) merge here