Baptized In The Fires Of The Cuyahoga River

Los Angeles-based artist veronique d’entremont presents an immersive installation that explores personal histories and present experiences of segregation and dissociation in the Cleveland area.

Working primarily in sculpture and sound, d’entremont’s work builds meaning through the layering of site, process and materials. Dividing lines, both visible and invisible, become the subject and the medium for her work. Architectural rubbings (like grave rubbings, only larger) reveal the doors and windows of an abandoned apartment complex, located on Lee road between Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland. Through a series of actions that resemble a ritual as much as they do an art practice, d’entremont takes these rubbings to the edge of a highway that divides America’s Oldest Housing Project from the new cafes and condos of Ohio City. The rubbings are coated in light-sensitive cyanotype chemicals, they are buried in rock salt, they are exposed to the sun—each action working to simultaneously reveal and obscure, to purify and to preserve. Finally, d’entremont takes these objects to Industrial Valley, where they wash them in the murky, opaque water of the Cuyahoga River.

More on the project HERE.