Here and There
Pace Gallery, NYC
Fall 2013

Photography: Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery

With Here and There, a two-part exhibition at Pace in London and New York, I explored both a local and global view of the natural world.

The New York presentation of Here and There concentrated on the geography of Manhattan and New York State (Here), while the London exhibition explored natural phenomena within but also beyond London, extending to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Arctic (There).  

Both exhibits started with a sectional drawing that maps the terrain above and below sea level intersecting both cities latitudinally and, for New York City, longitudinally as well. I was interested in using a very traditional, almost cliché, material— white marble— and a very mechanized process to reveal in a series of sculptures cross sections of the earth’s crust, creating circular pieces for the latitudes and linear ones for the longitudinal sections.

My focus was on the major waterways of both cities, and for There I chose to include a series based on the disappearance of some of our largest bodies of freshwater and of the arctic ice cap.

For the New York exhibit Here, I created a recycled silver sculpture of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. In this work, titled Silver Niagara, what we think of as enormous (the falls) becomes a minuscule connector between these vast two Great Lakes. My interest in uncovering aspects of the natural world also led me to create a pin river drawing of a now-hidden historic stream as well as capturing the highest floodwater mark of Hurricane Sandy in the New York and New Jersey area.

In both exhibits I wanted to ground us in a sense of our place and venture out and explore aspects of the world, such as the estuary of the Lena River or the Danube River, thus connecting us to a larger mapping of the world.

Related Press:

• Kino, Carol. Maya Lin’s New Memorial is a City. The New York Times (April 25, 2013)