ECOLOGY
Mercury (2014) – 121(h) × 144(w) x 240(d) – glazed and painted earthenware, glazed porcelain, photomontages on fabric, metal. wood.
MERCURY INSTALLATION
A life-scale white ceramic figure washes her feet in a vintage American bowl — a gesture of purification made uncertain by what the water already carries. Ceramic bluefin tuna and menhaden move through a photographic water floor while toy-scale 1949 Mercury coupes trace an infinity path through a car wash built from hand soap — the mercury symbol on each roof shifting from red to silver and back, a cycle without end. Convincing ceramic replicas of tuna cans rest on a bench and float in the water floor, a quiet reminder that mercury contamination enters domestic life directly — one can, according to some medical researchers, carrying enough toxin to make a person sick. The installation traces a single invisible path — from smokestack to ocean to table — asking at what point contamination becomes our responsibility.
Mercury (2014) – 96(h) x 120(w) x 2(d) photomontages on fabric, metal hanging brackets.
MERCURY PHOTOGRAPHY
These constructed photographs take the Mercury installation’s argument out of the gallery and into the open world — beaches, open water, the human body itself. A 1949 Mercury coupe advances along a beach toward the viewer and the stairs they are about to descend; a swimmer moves underwater surrounded by copper-toned coupes bearing red mercury symbols — a scene both fantastical and foreboding. In a third image, a translucent power plant is superimposed onto the swimmer’s torso — its coal stack aligned precisely with her nostril, a water bubble held there — while smoke rises behind her and fish move below the waterline. In the final image, titled Cross, a swimmer holds her position in open water, arms outstretched, her body forming a cross — while in the foreground a large bluefin floats belly up, separate and still, between her and the viewer.
SUMMER’S OVER
Made in the wake of the Gulf oil spill and the grief that moved across Florida, this work places a young woman rising from a sandbox at table height — close enough to touch, impossible to look away from. Yellow caution ribbon wraps the legs of the structure while rows of dead Gulf menhaden press into the sand, transforming a summer scene into something irreversible. From the tipped bucket spills a water-shaped ceramic form bearing a china paint photographic decal — an image the artist made of a model performing her own scream, the oil rig and waterway visible within it — containment broken, a personal and communal loss made visible.
SPILL
A life-scale figure rises from an oil barrel, hands on hips, her gaze meeting the viewer’s without apology — the posture of someone who watched the Gulf disaster unfold too slowly and was promised too much. The barrel sits on a wharf-style wooden pallet where dead menhaden — the smallest filter feeders in the Gulf ecosystem — lay scattered across the surface, black rubber oil seeping from the barrel’s base. Informed by conversations with a University of Florida fish scientist who joined the disaster response team, the work stands where the news cycle wouldn’t — in the dismay of those who watched and waited while a disaster the media called containable kept coming.
Spill (2013) – 81(h) x 40(w) x 64(d) – glazed and painted earthenware, glazed porcelain, metal, rubber, wood.
Garden (2010) — Full View/Front, 132(h) x 96(w) x 168(d) — Glazed and polychromed earthenware, china paint decals, wood, stainless steel, backlit photographs (Photo documentation: John Carlano)
GARDEN INSTALLATION
A white ceramic figure walks toward the viewer across an imagined field of white cosmos — flowers known to draw toxins from soil — her arm fractured yet still holding a vintage American water pitcher. Hand-created seed packets labeled Seeds of Hope spiral between the viewer and the figure — a foreground of promise inscribed with the hope of organic farming and affordable food — while an upturned blue hat holds ceramic alarm clocks, time and nourishment held together in the same gesture. Beyond the flower field a backlit metal triptych frames three photographic images of the same woman — one face turned left, one right, one centered with a small opening at her third eye, the metaphysical seat of inner vision, through which a child’s feet are visible — the future seen from within, not from without. Together the installation asks who tends the land, who is fed, and what we owe each other when the most basic act of nourishment has become compromised.
