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Pompeii 2079
Relics and Imagination
University of the Pacific  Museum 2017
South of Market 2019

 

In this body of work the ancient city of Pompeii and cement are activated as metaphors for seeing and thinking about our future world. Cement, first made with lime and volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius during the Roman empire was the fixative that froze the ancient city of Pompeii, Italy in 79 AD, nearly two thousand years ago. Pompeii’s citizens anticipated the Vesuvian eruption but did not respond to it’s devastating power and potential consequences.

The post-apocalyptic still life of this exhibition is a museum of the future: fragments of a 21rst century carbonized world are cast in cement, and debris is transformed into visual poetics; tar and feathers, pig intestine and cement hold a strange conversation. Part relic, part imagination, part detritus from an epoch of global extremes, the works here explore the poetics of rising waters, and collective precarity, of need, greed and our imagination of the future.  A second space of the gallery features tents made of wood and blankets, spaces for one person or small groups to engage, nap, or imagine the future. A Passport to the Future explores the metaphors of volcanoes, cement  and planetary fragility.

 

The next rendition of the exhiition will include expanded tiny wooden vigettes, large pig intestine buoys and expanded function of the tents

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