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CRYSTAL BITES OF DUST. January - March 2013.
an exhibition by Mie Olise at
Barbara Davis Gallery.
Mie Olise
moved to a new studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn prior to working on the project.
Crossing
the 9st bridge over Gowanus Canal every day, with abandoned factories and
layers of monuments Olise became interested in this specific urban situation. Bridges
on top of eachother and a canal so polluted that it reflects the sky in every
colour.
The
situation is similar to the one of New Jersey, bridges over polluted water.
Monuments and ruins of Industrialism. Olise is interested in these non-spaces
and voids that the industrial constructions creates. The space under the
bridge. The pores of the city, left behind to fall into dust.
In 1967
Robert Smitson wrote ”The Monuments of the Passaic”, published in Art Forum. A
day-trip to his native New Jersey and the monuments inhabiting it. Going over
the bridges of the Hackensack River. The trip also became a series of
photograhps. Robert Smitson uses the term ”non-spaces”, which in Olises vocabulary
translates to ”pores”, the empty pores of the city (that she referred to in her
2008 exhibition at Barbara Davis, Penetrating Pores of Construction).
Mirroring
New Jersey, on the other side of Manhattan, Olise investigates the monuments of
Gowanus. The spaces beneath the bridges, an abandoned factory and the polluted
waters of the Gowanus Canal.
As Robert
Smithson went to the west of
Manhattan, the Passaic bridges of New Jersey, describing the decaying monuments
of the Hackensack River area, Olise goes east
to Brooklyn, and though in another much more inhabited context and in another
time, she found a smiliar situation around the Gowanus Canal – black and dry as hell.
Olise
views the industrial landscape as a ruin, falling apart constructions that,
while they are still working, still hints the end of themselves and what they
represent. Passing
through these monuments, the crystals of industrialisation - falling apart, the visitor becomes one of the moving layers in the center of crosspaths,
vertically, horisontally and historically.
The black dust falling down from
the bridge, to the factory and into the canal – dust of the non-dissapearing
kind.
As a part of investigating Olise - as
Smithson - borrows material from the site, and in the proces she became
interested in testing the water of the Gowanus Canal and later digging into the
mud, to examine the pigmentation of the place. Painting has used earth
pigments for colour since the cave paintings, which is still referred to in the
names of the colours, Sienna, Umbra etc. All colour pigmentation used to come
from the earth, today they are chemically made. Olise decided to use the mud
from the canal as colour pigmentation following the ancient tradition. Only has
the world changed and the earth pigmentation is today chemical – on site.
