This is when the ice sheet ended
2020 | mixed media | installation view at SPACES, Cleveland, OH
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This is when the ice sheet ended explores Cleveland as a post-glacial landscape: it is both the site of a melted ice sheet and contemporary climate events. An installation of photographs, video and a free community-sourced map of SPACES’ surroundings overlaps recent neighborhood developments and the city’s industrial history with the deep time of the last ice age.
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An ice sheet once covered the landscape where you stand today | 2020 | video projection, vinyl text on wood pedestal, free paper map
Cleveland Today | 2020 | detail
This is when the ice sheet ended | 2020 | acrylic paint on mass-produced map | 23 x 23 inches
The project is as focused on “where” the city’s glacial history and built landscape intersect as “when.” How are we collaborators with the terrain, lake and river that made this place possible? How can we position ourselves as participants in the long history of the planet and what remains in the future? Modified maps place present-day Cleveland in geologic space and time. A slow-moving video projection of water rolling onto the shore of Lake Erie tries to picture the powerful geologic force of the advancing ice sheet that left this landscape. A takeaway guide invites visitors to go for a walk in that same landscape just outside of SPACES and notice the powerful geologic force of people. A related series of photo-installations—Rock Records—are modeled on the common practice of attaching memorial plaques to large boulders—glacial erratics—to commemorate a past person or event. Combining images of boulders and industrial debris with images of material culture, Rock Records are a proposed monument to the present moment, meant to be seen from the vantage point of imagined future geologists trying to make sense of the current climate crisis and the epochal shifts underway here and elsewhere..
Rock Record #1, Cleveland, OH (Barnes Ice Cap) | 2020 | adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print | 24 x 36 x 1/2 inches
Rock Record #2, Cleveland, OH (Dorrie + Twon under construction) | 2020 | adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print | 32 x 48 x 1/2 inches
Rock Record #3, Cleveland, OH (Air Products) | 2020 | adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print | 24 x 36 x 1/2 inches
Rock Record #5, Cleveland, OH (Bird Bench) | 2020 | adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print | 24 x 36 x 1/2 inches
Rock Record #4, Cleveland, OH (Clean the World) | 2020 | adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print | 24 x 36 x 1/2 inches
