This is when the ice sheet ended

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ARTIST STATEMENT:

This is when the ice sheet ended explores Cleveland as a post-glacial landscape: it is both the site of a melted ice sheet and contemporary climate events. An installation of photographs, video and a free community-sourced map of SPACES’ surroundings overlaps recent neighborhood developments and the city’s industrial history with the deep time of the last ice age.

PROJECT DETAILS:

The works in the exhibition are as focused on “where” the city’s glacial history and built landscape intersect as “when.” How are we collaborators with the terrain, lake and river that made this place possible? How can we position ourselves as participants in the long history of the planet and what remains in the future? Modified maps place present-day Cleveland in geologic space and time. A slow-moving video projection of water rolling onto the shore of Lake Erie tries to picture the powerful geologic force of the advancing ice sheet that left this landscape. A takeaway guide invites visitors to go for a walk in that same landscape just outside of SPACES and notice the powerful geologic force of people. A series of photo-installations—Rock Records—propose a type of monument to the present moment. These are based on the practice of attaching memorial plaques to glacial erratics, but instead make use of industrial debris and rearranged boulders affixed with snapshots of the contemporary constructed landscape. They are meant to be seen from the vantage point of imagined future geologists trying to make sense of the current changing climate and the epochal shifts underway here and elsewhere.

LIST OF WORKS:

• An ice sheet once covered the landscape where you stand today (2020), video projection, vinyl text on wood pedestal, free paper map

• Cleveland today (2020), paint and vinyl text on wall

• This is when the ice sheet ended (2020), acrylic paint on mass-produced map, 23 x 23 inches

• Rock Record #1, Cleveland, OH (Barnes Ice Cap) (2020), adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print, 24 x 36 x 1/2 inches

• Rock Record #2, Cleveland, OH (Dorrie + Twon under construction) (2020), adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print, 32 x 48 x 1/2 inches

• Rock Record #3, Cleveland, OH (Air Products) (2020), adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print, 24 x 36 x 1/2 inch

• Rock Record #4, Cleveland, OH (Clean the World) (2020), adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print, 24 x 36 x 1/2 inch

• Rock Record #5, Cleveland, OH (Bird Bench) (2020), adhesive-backed pigment print, framed pigment print, 24 x 36 x 1/2 inch

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Special thanks to the following people who walked and/or talked with me: Michelle Bennett, Bruce Edwards, Kayle Gorenflo, Joe Hannibal, Peter Ketter, Marc Lefkowitz, Molly Mizisin, Jayce Renner, Tom Starinsky, and Megan Young, and to Vedda Printing for their speedy and spectacular print job. Extra thanks to the board and staff at SPACES for their unwavering support during an unprecedented time.

SPACES would also like to thank Black Valve Media and Rustin McCann for documenting this exhibition.

Pick up a free map during your next visit to SPACES.