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RELICS is a large-scale modular installation, originally created for the exhibition Artists Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial, at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2001. A labor-intensive collaboration with Clinton Snider, we proposed an immersive room-sized installation, chronicling the 300-year history of Detroit through a floor-to-ceiling collection of found objects and mixed media sculptures. Building approximately 400 wooden boxes in our respective studios, we used thousands of eroded man-made objects found throughout Detroit and created each individual RELICS box to become part of towering grid-like reliquary walls. Based on ideas of scientific taxonomy, archeology, wunderkammers, and the talismanic qualities of ancient artifacts, we saw the installation as a comment on natural history museums of the future, how quickly objects from our time become obsolete, and a way to recycle and recontextualize wasted materials into objects of beauty and art. Since 2001, RELICS has been reconfigured site-specifically dozens of times, including the RELICS ARC of 2003 and versions exhibited in Vienna, New York City, Chicago, Stutgart, Windsor, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Detroit. Hundreds of boxes have been sold in site-specific grids, and thousands of new boxes have been created over the last twenty-plus years. |
Excerpt from original RELICS artists’ statement, c.2002: As technology spreads into the future, the obsolete are left behind. New things are cre- ated while past creations decay. Nature begins to take apart what we once struggled to assemble. There is a threshold that’s hard to pinpoint, when the man-made object becomes nature again. The difference becomes blurred, but the beauty of this transition becomes visible: concrete cracks with plant life, iron bleeds rusty stains, years of paint stratify walls, wood warps and buckles to the elements, trees grow on tar roofs. For most of my life, Detroit has epitomized this transition. Through the RELICS installation, we’ve excavated thousands of objects from this natural cycle and used them to create a display of natural history. Viewers are overloaded by input, not unlike my own experiences while exploring forgotten sites. These are our contemporary relics, and within them is our history. Detroit is always moving and changing, transiting cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. In 300-some years, Detroit has gone from marshes, forests, and wildlife, to farmland and expansive industry, to post-industrial wasteland and waning population, and now, once again, it is rebirthing like a phoenix from the ashes. The RELICS installation attempts to capture this transition and present viewers with the question what is art? Or, more appropriately, when is art? RELICS aims for a communication regarding creating, destroying, and leaving be- hind, hoping to spark reveries, inspire conversation, and to overwhelm with information, memory, and energy generated by thousands of future relics. |
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