Unearth – Silk Prints

Unearth, Solo Exhibition 500m Museum, Sapporo Japan, 2016

Unearth, is a public project for the city of Sapporo, Japan. It is presented as a part of the 500m Museum / Sapporo Odori Chika Gallery, within one of the longest underground commuter passageways in the world. My work fills four 40 foot long built in case works. I am exhibiting, a sculptural installation using pyrite stones and spotlights, a series of silk prints depicting fool’s gold suspended in light shafts – photographed in a cave in central Oregon, and a video. The linear installation format allows for the movement of the passing viewer to animate the ephemeral qualities of the evocative material in shifting cloud formations.

The cave in Oregon and the commuter tunnel in Sapporo are similar in scale and geological placement – running as long tubes beneath the surface substrate. While one is hidden and almost mythical, revealing itself through fantastic imagery, the other is routine, ubiquitous and unimaginative. The accumulation and dispersion of the material in the cave is echoed on the very thin and luminous silk prints, as well as the stones presented – casting a trace, memory, or suggestion of potential in the otherwise ordinary confines of the commuter tunnel. Sapporo is the sister city to Portland, Oregon, maintaining both real economic ties and cultural fascinations.