Speed of Stone

Curated by Jess Wilcox
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street

Opening reception: Friday, December 13th, 6-8pm

Alchemyverse
Ana Teresa Barboza
Elena Damiani
Joel Kuennen
Athena LaTocha
Mary Mattingly
Elise Rasmussen
Catherine Telford Keogh
Michael Wang


Curator’s Statement:

Speed of Stone presents the work of artists inspired by geologic processes and principles, minerals, and Earth health. Spanning media from painting and sculpture to sound and video, the works explore time scales at the limits of human comprehension–from the origins of Earth to the potential end of humanity. Focusing on rocks and minerals, rather than their more charismatic plant and animal cousins, Speed of Stone asks us to think about time and change on two levels: the exhibition elucidates the incredibly slow but continuous shifts in the Earth’s long history, evolution, and regenerative processes, including the literal speed of stone. At the same time it highlights artists’ reactions to the alarming pace of human-induced climate change, from impassioned grief to calls for radical action.

Mary Mattingly’s compositions draw connections between human systems of short-term time-keeping and geologic deep time. Her poetic experiments use water–a key component linking geologic and biologic systems–as material and metaphor. The tide etching “Neap Tide” records the levels of the Hudson River’s estuary salts, after evaporation, during a period of low water flow. The textile print “King Tide”, in contrast, marks the flooding of exceptionally high tides as the sea level rises, recording tidal salt accumulations as a dye sublimation image. Mattingly represents the Earth’s holistic dynamism as simultaneously abstract and material–a loop, a moon, a planet, and a circle–brought into focus with time and distance.

Elise Rasmussen’s video “in the Valley of the Moon” lays out the contradictions of geoscientific discovery and progress, including green technology and its entanglement with mining. The narrative’s point of departure is the rich mineral resources of the Atacama Desert in Chile, and the technological advances that region has facilitated with largely devastating consequences. Rasmussen chronicles the rise and fall of the trade in sodium nitrate, also known as saltpeter, a mineral used for explosives and chemical warfare as well as fertilizer and food preservatives. Shot on 16mm film transferred to HD digital, the film contemplates its own material entanglement with the mining industries it documents, alternating between grainy yet vibrant film, historically made with nitrocellulose (which shares the volatile nitrogen element with the Atacaman mines), and 4K ultra-high-definition digital cameras dependent on rare earth metals.

Terroir, literally ‘land’ in French, refers to the unique combination of environmental factors that affect a crop’s distinct attributes. It’s a term often used in the world of affluent mobility to compare the distinct pleasures of regional food and wine. Michael Wang’s “Terroir” series highlights the concept’s dependence on travel, a leading cause of global carbon emissions. The artist collects bedrock samples from his own far-flung travels, which he pulverizes into pigment and paints into monochromes, presented together with the field sample of the rock. The paintings’ thin rectangular shapes approximate human size, serving as stand-ins for the body and human agency. With this laborious grinding gesture Wang accelerates the geologic process of erosion, condensing it into a time span and trajectory comprehensible to humans. Wang’s paintings also function as portraits of places, each distilling the individuality and essence of the location into an abstract image.

Like Wang’s “Terroir” series, Ana Teresa Barbozas Emerging Stone reminds us that our everyday experience of color derives from particulate matter of a microscopic scale. Barboza illustrates a wind-carved rock with bands of sediment articulated in tawny greens, ambers, and tans. The map key identifies the hues to their plant sources–acacia, eucalyptus, bougainvillea–rather than geologic time periods.  Although Barboza’s renderings are in embroidery they function conceptually as paintings, with their plant-pigment dyed threads and supporting canvas.  Woven and sewn are apt descriptions of the material world that Barboza seeks to describe, where minerals travel through plant and human species in a complex and interconnected system.

Athena LaTocha’s
“Mesabi Series” reflects on how land has been exploited for the industrial use of minerals. Using reclaimed iron ore, LaTocha poured and manipulated this molten metal into beds of sand on site at iron deposits in the Mesabi Mountain Range in northern Minnesota. The name of the range derives from local Ojibwe which refer to it as “Sleeping Giant”. The resulting blot-like reliefs recall both topographical maps and fluvial diagrams of sedimentary deposition by rivers and streams. Their rust color, blotchy shapes, and lacey textures echo the aesthetic of industrial ruin that interested the minimalists of the 70’s. While the works possess the variegated surfaces, luster, and vibrant hue of these predecessors, LaTocha bypasses metal’s commercial refinement by going straight to the material source in her ancestral homelands.

Catherine Telford Keogh’s Compost Indexesregister deep time through her use of stone formed through millennia-long processes, and also in the forms of single-use plastic containers that are quickly produced but will take millennia to decay. Telford expedites the geologic process of erosion by sandblasting and waterjet-cutting marble, granite and onyx slab remainders and off-cuts from interior use. These slick surfaces become platforms for glass sculptures molded into the shapes of easily identifiable containers for laundry detergent and cleaning products, often toxic substances derived from the fossil fuel industry.  By adopting common commercial aesthetics, Telford draws attention to the psychology of contemporary consumption based on efficiency and desire and underlines its environmental consequences.

Elena Damiani’s “Erratic Marbles XI” invites close observation and comparative analysis of the ‘specimens’ in the ‘sample’ of 18 collages. The collages combine luxurious marbled endpapers of atlases and expedition journals from the late 1700s and early 1800s with found photographs of glacial erratics, rocks that have migrated from their place of origin via glacial movement. The rocks’ journeys make them among the most relatable geologic phenomena today. While the power, scale, and movement of the glaciers that transported these massive rocks may inspire awe, the concept of the body displaced from its place of birth is more familiar to the contemporary viewer. The pairing of the rocks’ images with atlas endpapers is a reminder that mapping of the Earth’s land went hand in hand with destructive mineral prospecting in the service of human “progression” in speed and profit.

Joel Kuennen’s two series “The Living Earth” and “A Messianic Frame” both use the mineral olivine as a signifier for the potential of life, both past and future. Kuennen draws on research that finds olivine crucial in both the Earth’s tectonic functioning (a precursor for all biological life) and in carbon sequestration (a possible means of defraying carbon emissions and slowing climate change). For The Living Earth, Kuennen binds fragments of natural serpentinized olivine produced by the tectonic actions on the seafloor to the walls with sinuous copper supports.  A Messianic Frame imbeds lab-grown flecks of olivine in basalt, resembling exoplanets in the universe’s black vacuum.

Alchmeyverse’s “WEND” sculptures and performance activate the Earth’s material capacity for vibration and movement that is often outside our sensory scope. Like the works by Mattingly and LaTocha, these evolve from on-site field work with materials sourced directly from the landscape. The WEND assemblages incorporate matter that is associated with change and growth over time: calcified bone, conductive copper, symbiotic lichen, fragments of coral communities, and igneous rocks that once flowed as lava. They then use bone-conducting transmitters, electromagnetic sensors, subwoofers and field recordings to amplify the latent dynamism of materials that only appear inert.  Alchemyverse both records and replays these vibrations that human perception too often misses.

Speed of Stone is a modest sample of a deluge of recent contemporary art practice that takes up the energy and vitality of Earth’s matter.  While not all the artworks on view operate in the deep time of geology, they share what Geologist Marcia Bjornerud has called timefulness. A portmanteau of mindfulness and timelessness, timefulness is a poly-temporal worldview that connects geologic time and matter with our current crises.  Bjornerud’s subtitle for the book Timefulness indicates the stakes with which we must reckon: “How Thinking Like A Geologist Can Help Save the World.”  


Image: Catherine Telford Keogh, “Compost Index 3 with Volume 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1” (Detail),  2023. Sandblasted Salvaged Multicolor Onyx Tiles, Waterjet Salvaged Italian Marble Tiles, Mold Blown Glass CLEARA™ H2O Filter System Dispenser, Mold Blown Glass Super Tech Full Synthetic SAE™ 5W-30 Motor Oil, 5 Quarts, Mold Blown Glass Sun® Liquid Laundry Detergent, Clean & Fresh, Mold Blown Glass AquaNation™ 5 Gallon Water Bottle Jug, Coins. 17 x 144.5 x 72.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Sebastian Bach




88 Eldridge St. New York, NY 10002
Tel: 212-243-2735
Open Thurs-Sun 1-6pm 
© 601Artspace, 2018