Work in Progress: Writings on Unknown Certainty project

This is a writing revolving around a project I am developing and currently making elements for. No Unknown Certainties have been realized yet but pictures will be posted as they come to fruition.



Project Statement:
Unknown Certainty is a series of outdoor installations that use the form of roadside memorial to investigate non-specific markers of death. Within the installations, the objects comprising the memorials give no mention to specifics of the one memorialized. No name, photos, or references to gender, race, sexuality, and age are found. The sites for these memorials are not spectacular but rather mundane niches of roads, underpasses, wooded lands, and public parks. Although the form is instantly recognizable as a memorial and reminds of the inevitability of death, the namelessness and lack of objects reflecting personality creates the unknown. Who the memorial is for, why it is there, and how the namelessness of these memorials incites a fear of being forgotten all center on the unknown and the unremembered. Often constructed of banal and some ephemeral materials, these works touch further on the unremembered through the unspectacular and non prestigious quality of objects in the memorials and the impermanence of their erection. Within the context of contemporary ways of mourning and grieving, the spontaneous roadside memorial has come to prominence over the romantic graveyard. Through Unknown Certainty, the impromptu nature of roadside memorials is addressed and a concern for long-term upkeep and existence of these memorials is illustrated by visual evidence of decay and neglect as well as the temporal nature of the installations.

Images of Cemeteries Recently Visited

Brookmere Cemetery

Certain aspects of these shots interest me and are being worked on for my proposal to this cemetery for a future installation. The stacking, the counterbalance of geometric and organic forms, and forms of the grave markers are the major points of inspiration.







East Cleveland Township Cemetery

I enjoyed working with the East Cleveland Township Cemetery greatly for Fleeting and am toying with ideas for another proposal for a future installation there. Points of inspiration here are the odd objects/ debris found throughout the grounds and the relationships between the grave markers, the banal of backyards and debris, and the potential art object.

Fleeting: Photos of Work Through Exhibition Duration

Somehow, I did not post these before. These shots are in no particular order and all where taken during the month Fleeting was on exhibit at the East Cleveland Township Cemetery.

Spomenik- Slovenian Monument

A few days ago, a brief entry on todayandtomorrow.net caught my attention. It's about the photographic work of Jan Kempenaers. Jan took the time to explore the ex-Yugoslavia region, examining in particular structures commissioned in the 1960s and 70s as monuments to sites of WWII battles and concentration camps. The structures are truly fascinating and very inspiring to me. Please enjoy the link.

Spomeniks

Fleeting: Viewing as a Happening

After experiencing the critique for Fleeting this past week, I have thinking of how the work on the day it was viewed and by who viewed it plays a dual role as a sort of happening in addition to its role as a site-specific installation. Through the dreary weather, the coldness and despair in the work became amplified. With their umbrellas and hunched bodies, the audience for the critique became active and further stressed this coolness and despair found in Fleeting. The visual of the hundreds of browned formerly white roses, especially the ones that fell off the brick structure, referenced this notion of being left with bone, the flesh all having been decayed and separated from the body. The wetness of the rain offered a physical coldness to match this cool read of Fleeting. The ways in which the weather effected the audience of the critique and the brevity of the critique are the two factors that lead me to view Fleeting as a potential happening.

Fleeting: Images from Critique/ Happening?

Fleeting: Documentation of Documentation Space