The Luminary Installation Space (IS):

Manda Remmen

On view May-June, 2010

“We humans take our measure of being from what surrounds us, and what surrounds us is always, to some extent, of our own making.” Robert Harrison, Hic Jacket

Manda Remmen inaugurates The Luminary Installation Space with Sanctuary, a monumental piece constructed of silk and latex casts of wood preserved from barns. Balancing the space’s history as a chapel and the weathered barn that informs the structure, the immersive work creates both a memorial and a space for meditation.

The weightlessness of the work is tethered by the materiality of the wood casts, which are made up of decades of marks where someone cut the wood or the weather eroded it away. Each mark on the object is a distinct reminder of its history, anchoring it in time and place. Taken as a whole, the marks form a narrative of physical memories suspended in the silk columns in the pattern of a typical basilica.

The structure carries the viewer inward into a distinct, hushed environment that mutes the outward world. The immediate referents–the barn, the basilica–are left behind as one moves amid the overarching casts. Once transmuted into latex casts, the terrestrial begins to float; the physical becomes ethereal, yet is simultaneously preserved more permanently than the original structure itself, continuing to make imperceptible marks on the space as it moves.