It doesn’t matter if you frequent the art museum or are encountering it for the first time—the objects there will confront you with the same set of questions.
What is this? Why choose these materials? Why create this at all? And, if you’re lucky, why does this make me feel this way?
Earth’s Winding-Sheet, the new exhibition at the Lilley Museum of Art, takes dust, dirt and debris as its central subject. Dust may seem a surprising focus for an art exhibition. It is a substance composed of an incredibly diverse universe of detritus: eroded minerals, motes of soil, dead skin cells, specks of wood, bits of fur and hair, textile fibers, pollen and even burnt meteorite particles.
But compare these scraps to more traditional artistic mediums. Clay is sourced straight from the ground, and many paints, charcoals and inks derive their pigment and staying power from mineral, plant or even animal substances. After all, these are the materials available to us on this planet, in this cosmos, and even inside of our own bodies. How we reorganize them may be up to us, but they will always delineate the parameters of our existence.
“Do we have the capacity as humans to create a new thing?” asks curator Stephanie Gibson. It’s an interesting question, and the exhibition seems to suggest that the answer is both yes and no. Conscious of this central contradiction, the artists featured in Earth’s Winding-Sheet draw from the spectrum of dust to make work that explores their relationship to the elemental matter of our existence.
A display of the watercolors of Ruth Hilts makes this tension between the new and the primordial quite clear. The paintings were made exclusively with hand-ground pigments Hilts termed “Nevada Earth Colors.” These pigments, collected from dirt and minerals in different parts of the state, are stored in Gerber baby food jars and displayed as a work of art in their own right. Each appears as a microcosmic desert world—a shifting, sloping horizon of colorful sand and its own dusty atmosphere are contained in each jar. Above, the watercolor paintings that utilize these pigments depict mineral-heavy landscapes not unlike the land from which the colors came.
If Hilts’ paintings allow us a link to a specific place, the exhibition’s video installations expose dust’s infiltration of time. In her short film reclamation, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy makes digital scans of different concrete structures in St. Augustine, Fla. In the video that results from stitching thousands of these frames together, one close-up glitches into the next. Under the watery eye of the lens, the concrete is exposed for what it is—small pebbles like the beach of a shallow lake, shells embedded in hard, processed mineral beds like a fossil record. And the concrete is a historical record—the video’s content includes footage of Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the United States. Built by the Spanish starting in 1672, this structure was first used as a military prison that detained Native Americans and eventually served as a thoroughfare for the escape of fugitive British slaves to Spanish Florida.
On some level, Thirumalaisamy’s video is a work of mineral on mineral on mineral. The concrete itself is a composite containing shells, rocks, sand and pulverized stone. This is, in turn, mediated by a camera made of metallic hardware and rechargeable batteries. Finally, these records are presented to us through a television screen, displayed on more minerals and glass that have been melted and re-molded into a flat shape.
Layered like this, these minerals supply us with a kind of portal, not only through space and time, but to new feelings, new thoughts and new relationships to the materials that populate our lives. Is it possible that art objects hold the potential to move us in a way similar to a sublime mountain range—because they are quite literally made of that mountain range?
Earth’s Winding-Sheet makes it obvious that this remixing of finite material occurs in the work of art regardless of medium, and that museums and galleries have the ability to recontextualize our realities. It’s difficult to look out over the actual mountain range and comprehend the stakes of our current environmental crisis, let alone its potential solutions. Working our perceptions out on these smaller scales can allow us to conceive of the bigger, interconnected picture by breaking the very complex down into digestible portions.
To these ends, Kim Abeles’ food-shaped smog accumulations remind us that we are always consuming these bits of our degraded environment, while Brie Ruais’ sweeping clay gestures record the way her body moves across the material.
It’s important to remember that we possess this potential for influence. Many pieces in the exhibition repurpose the refuse of commercial and imperial production and domination in ways that make their impact easy to understand. If they can effectively model the environmental degradation we now face as a result of these legacies of exploitation, they can also model how we might bend the materials upon which our lives depend into new configurations.
Earth’s Winding-Sheet is on view at the Lilley Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, at 1664 N. Virginia St., through Saturday, Nov. 21. Related events include “Curiosity Lab,” a talk with artist Kim Abeles from 6 to 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 14, at Desert Research Institute, 2215 Raggio Parkway; a talk with visiting artist collective Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine) from 6 to 7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 22, in the Schulich Lecture Hall at UNR; and a screening of the film The History of Concrete from 7 to 9 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 5, at the Lilley. Learn more at www.unr.edu/lilley.