Monday, September 17, 2012

SECULAR COLUMBARIUM FOR THE ISLAND


 





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