‘The Dido Project; Body as Stylus’

The Dido Project is an offshoot of an ongoing effort to explore, research and interpret the historic New York City metropolitan coastline. Since 2011, every excursion is recorded with GPS tracking devices, using my own moving body as a stylus to ‘draw’ lines on the surface of this area of the planet (ie; satellite maps). Tracks are uploaded to Google Earth appearing as red lines to generate an ever expanding imaginary line circumscription of the city’s current landmasses- far different from those of the precolonial era due to centuries of landfilling. The Oxhide Myth describes how the Phoenician Queen Dido acquired a great tract of land in Tunisia by deceiving the Berbers. In this real estate deal, she requested and was granted a tiny piece of land- the amount encompassed by the hide of an ox. But to the Berbers’ dismay the hide was cut into thin strips and joined together to circumscribe a vast hillside. In my own benign version of this fable I seek to encompass the entirety of the City- some 570 miles of coastline. Though more than 620 miles have been logged (including surrounding metropolitan areas and repeat excursions), there are many more to come.

‘Battle of Tucapel’

As a child, Lauturo was abducted by Pedro de Valdivia, the Spanish Governor of Chile. Serving as the conquistador’s personal servant he learned military tactics and horsemanship. Finally escaping years later, Lauturo returned to his Mapuche people. As toqui, or wartime chief he used this acquired knowledge to decimate the conquistadors at the Battle of Tucapel in 1553 where the captured Valdivia met a grisly end. In one account, he was given the riches he sought in the form of molten gold- poured down his throat.

‘Sinister Bundle’

This was the original term Charles Thompson used when designing the American emblem in 1782 to describe the cluster of arrows clutched in the eagle’s left, or sinister talon. Here the bundle is inverted implying America is at peace and the double bow is inter-bound with its ends aloft suggesting unity amongst its populace is possible. Constructed during the 2020 election cycle.

‘Tumbling Monuments’ (series)

To many indigenous nations the turtle represents North America (or the Earth itself). In their oral tradition the Iroquois speak of Muskrat depositing mud on Turtles back until it formed an immense landmass. For this reason some Indigenous people refer to North America as ‘Turtle Island’. In ‘New World, Turtle Island’ the hollowed out turtle shell is surmounted by crumbling icons of Western Civilization. Ionic columns made of clay tobacco pipe stem fragments found along the edges of the New York City harbor. A similar narrative is invoked in its companion piece ‘New World, Pacific Islands’. Other scale monuments were created during the George Floyd protests during the summer of 2020 including ‘Cristobal Comes Down’, ‘Horse and Rider’ and  ‘Historical Record’. If the aforementioned are tumbling by means of determined protests, ‘Unknown Soldiers’ is perhaps crumbling instead. It is a diminutive display of the neglect for and disinterest of our ailing veterans and other essential infrastructure - military or otherwise. The minute, lonely park bench invites the viewer to look closely and take their time to decipher the inverted bas relief (one half of a two part mold of pre-WWII lead soldiers). Though the reverse side is more dilapidated with its fragile framing exposed, the stout timber buttress lends hope.

‘Tobias Filpotus Felix Filium, or Tobey Philpot’s Fortunate Son’

A pair of columns rise above heaps of empty vessels like twin family trees bridged by a frieze bearing the name. They are topped by figurative capitals- an inverted Tobey sitting on his chamber pot and a doll head in the likeness of a young gentleman of Washington Irving’s ilk. This colossus in miniature forms a gateway monitored by Frozen Charlotte sentries and other surveillance systems.

‘YOG-64’ (photograph)

Although this vessel has been in the muddy grip of the Arthur Kill for a half century, it began its life in the Pacific where it bore witness to three nuclear blasts. YOG-64 (the US hull identification for a yard oiler) was built for the Navy in Portland, OR in 1944 and deployed to Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands to provide ship-to-shore support during Operation Sandstone, America’s third series of nuclear tests in 1948. The three tests, X-ray (37 kilotons), Yoke (49 kilotons) and Zebra (18 kilotons and deemed optimal) were so successful that the new ‘Mark IV’ device would become the first mass-produced nuclear weapon. After decontamination at Pearl Harbor the ship was purchased by Reinauer Transportation Co on Staten Island then eventually sold for scrap. Self portrait, Rossville, Staten Island 2005

‘Denied Environment’ series

A denied environment is a military term for an extremely hostile battle zone where the enemy’s defenses seem impenetrable. In each of pieces the tell tale signs of the casting process were left in place, evident in their stem-like bases (now a positive of the hole into which the molten pewter was poured into the mold) and uncut sprue (now a positive of the vents allowing the air to escape). This reflects the process of turning ores into valuable commodities.

‘Mars Supine’

The death of War itself. Among the miniature, disabled canon, bullets of varying calibers and eras and broken pipe fragments lies the war god Mars. His hollowed out torso is infested with empty and perforated periwinkle shells collected along the Carteret, N.J. shores of the Arthur Kill.

‘Teller's Memory’

This piece is an imagined slab of fossil rich stone or shattered mosaic excised from our planet in the distant future. Shells and unglazed 19th century ceramic shards were gathered from deposits along the forgotten shores of Brooklyn. Sliced with a diamond blade and laid out in a mold in fernlike composition, they were cast in midnight blue pigmented plaster laced with pulverized incandescent lightbulbs.

‘Trace’

A Jersey City Holocene fossil- spanning the epoch from the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) to the Anthropocene (1950 to present). Made of hydrocal, found pottery (ca 1850), spisula solidissima and argopecten irradians shells, pulverized incandescent light bulbs, carbon

‘White Devil Docked’

‘White Devil Docked’ is modeled on the traditional face jugs of the American South. The unglazed porcelain and earthenware shards were collected along the shoreline near Jersey City, New Jersey and presumably the waste material of the Jersey Porcelain and Earthenware Company or the American Pottery Manufacturing Company, both active during the early to mid 19th Century. Shells and stones from the site comprise parts of the head and the pointed tongue is European ballast flint, also used in the porcelain manufacturing process. The docked nose (docking, or rhinotomy, or cutting off the nasal cartilage was a form of punishment and social shaming in various cultures) is the broken buttocks of a small porcelain figure. The large ears on this grotesque and awkward vessel suggests a loving cup (or hating cup).

‘Harmensen’s Demise’

Hendrick Harmensen , “who may be the first white man that turned a furrow in” Maspeth, Queens in the 1640s and “having previously been an armourer in the Dutch service, was accustomed to forging tomahawks for the Indians round about him; but on that certain occasion” (retribution for Dutch Governor Kieft’s unprovoked and immoral attacks on Lenape and Wappinger families) they “assaulted him, and one of them gave him a fatal blow, and terminated his life with one of the very instruments of death that he had made for him”. From Annals of Newtown, James Riker, Jr.  1852. (axe heads found in NYC waterways)

‘Grotesque’

ROMA MCDLXXX (CE 1480)

A wandering man fell through a hole on Capitoline Hill above Rome. Lighting a torch he illuminated a labyrinth of painted walls revealing artistic styles lost to time. Twisting vines and ever sprouting leaves painted symmetrically, climbed the walls in reds, pinks and greens entwining fantastic beasts and effortlessly supporting architectural scenes of far away places. He had stumbled upon the remains of Nero’s Domus Aurae - a sprawling palace burned to the ground in LXIV (CE 64) and long since covered over with more than a millennium of rock and debris. The revelation attracted Raphael and other artists who then adopted and interpreted these themes into the Renaissance canon. These motifs retained a hold on the artistic and architectural imagination well into the 20th century. Hybrid creatures were a favorite, leading to the term grotesque (ie: grotto). Strange faces grimacing above doorways and spiraling acanthus leaves on building facades are prevalent here in NYC and other places emulating the grottesci of Rome.

‘Anhooke’

The Quaker fugitive and Bronx homesteader Anne Hutchinson was killed by Wampage (Siwanoy) in August of 1643 during Kieft’s (or Wappinger) War in retribution for Native murders. He didn’t consider her responsible for these acts, but a price had to be paid. In a form of respect, he took her name as they knew it: Anhooke (after Anne’s Hook, the spit of land her farm occupied). Face to face they share a bifurcated clay tobacco pipe becoming one through the mutual and cultural interest in tobacco.

‘Poseidon’s Peril’

A dismembered and hollowed-out Poseidon perches atop this cascade of found miniature vessels  transformed into ancient amphorae - broken, empty and dry.

‘Tableaux Mordant’

Inspired by Edgar Samuel Paxson’s 1899 painting of Custer’s Last Stand- a tightly packed tableaux of violence. Here, lead soldiers of various conflicts throughout history, bullets and bullet fragments and animal teeth are embedded in asphalt- a modern era matrix.

‘Corona Aurae Americanus’

Found pewter vessels and Americana dating from the 1950s melted down and recast as disposable utensil handles. Made during the 2020 election cycle, it’s previous title was ‘Winning Yet?’- a cheap, gaudy crown fit for an modern day American Cesar.

‘The Weight of Lead’

An obelisk made of found lead type blocks,  square and true at the base, destabilized at the top.

‘Stuyvesant’s Last Stand’

Petrus Stuyvesant saved the failing commercial endeavor of New Amsterdam with military-style discipline and religious intolerance but ultimately surrendered to British forces in 1664. It is constructed of a chair leg, shoe leather, rubber mat and silver-plated fork tines found along the shores of New York City. The chair leg was found in the mud in Tottenville, Staten Island, chained below the waterline to a piling and retrieved several years later. The pattern of fork tine nails represents the ‘XXX’ brand of the City of Amsterdam and subsequently New York City.

‘Leeuwenhoek's Minutiae’

This piece was built with some of the smallest artifacts recovered from New York City area swamps and beaches. The central glass sphere contains slag reduced to sand in the industrial waters of the Arthur Kill. As the title infers, ‘Leeuwenhoek’s Minutiae’ is a visual imagining in the form of a microscope of the Dutch Optical scientist’s days as he tinkered in his drape shop/laboratory. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered living microbes through his finely crafted lenses in the 1670s, naming them ‘diertgens’, or tiny animals.

‘Tiny Animals’

imagining his daily details

once toiling in a drape shop-turned-lab

Delft, 1650

inspecting the finest threads

soon peering through a perfected lens

glass melted, ground?

keeping methods close to vest

now spying tiny animals unseen

‘til then, ‘diertgens’

‘Viral Footprint’

Syringe parts (hypodermic needles, barrels and plungers) were found on the shores of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn (presumably from the 1940s/1950s) are assembled in the likeness of a toxic raincloud or stinging man-o-war. On the top is the sole of a boys shoe depicting a Minuteman running with his bayonet-fitted musket, as sharp as the needles beneath. As if extending its own tentacles, it’s encircled by the scraps, the die cut negative parts of synthetic shoe leather.

‘Extraction’

25 samples of sand collected from beaches throughout the New York City area encased in a glass beaker displayed like strata in a geologic core sample.

‘Dido’s Colonial Quadrille’

66 ceramic 'collages' linked to form a variation of a Gunter's chain, a 17th Century land surveying tool consisting of 33 lengths of elongated steel links used for physically measuring land and therefore widely used the define boundaries and stake out territories of North America and elsewhere.The Oxhide Myth describes how the Phoenician Queen Dido acquired a great tract of land in Tunisia by deceiving the Berbers. In this real estate deal, she requested and was granted a tiny piece of land- the amount encompassed by the hide of an ox. But to the Berbers’ dismay the hide was cut into thin strips and joined together to circumscribe a vast hillside. Maker’s marks dominate the outward facing side displaying crowns and coats of arms of European manufacturers, mostly from England while the inward facing side is insular and white. Other pieces show period Europeans at leisure, many are fragments of the Colonial Couple‘s Quadrille Dance pattern of antique porcelain ware.

‘Right of Discovery’

In 1493, the Vatican divided the globe (or what they knew of it), making the New World available for Christian conquest. Pope Alexander VI’s ‘Inter Caetera’ states: “And we make, appoint, and depute you and your said heirs and successors lords of them with full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind…” These glass binoculars (made of found antique bottles and other glass fragments) stare out at the horizon seeking the next ‘undiscovered’ land.

‘Raleigh’

Sir Walter Raleigh was a complex character of the Elizabethan era. A child soldier, a privateer, a searcher for El Dorado, a colonizer of the Americas, a courtier of Elizabeth I and perhaps responsible for introducing tobacco to England. But in the end he was accused of treason and executed at the chopping block, his head embalmed, placed in a decorative velvet pouch and given to his widow. He was celebrated in his time for his achievements for crown and country and opinion was that his execution was unjust. Here, he is indicted by contemporary eyes for the brutality of slavery, as he championed a labor intensive cash crop that fueled the triangle trade. The wide collar made of sea-softened clay pipe fragments are from the Thames River and acquired from a local mudlarker.

‘Imperfect Union’

Made of unglazed porcelain shards, fingerprint laden clay kiln wasters, porcelain doll parts, clay pipe fragments, European ballast flint, reclaimed/recast pewter, steel, aluminum and epoxy. The Ceremonial Mace of the House of Representatives is an American symbol of power and unity designed in the Roman aesthetic. The original commissioned by Congress in 1789 was destroyed when the British burned the House during the War of 1812. The New York Times on March 18, 1982 stated: “The present mace, in use since 1842, was made by William Adams of New York. It is 46 inches tall and consists of 13 thin ebony rods, representing the 13 original states, bound together with bands of silver and topped with a silver globe bearing an eagle. ”The main column of this scaled-up, fractured version is constructed of fingerprint laden clay kiln furniture and other elements attached to a chain link fence post. The globe, straps and collars are made from melted down/recast pewter objects sourced from NYC waterways and local thrift shops. As the title suggests, Americans are still struggling to achieve that ‘more perfect Union’ envisioned by the Founding Fathers.