Spartan Solar

Marble Room is a sculptural mixed media project created in collaboration with fellow artist Grant M. Brownlow. It presents a possible future past of digital and physical ruins – blending the ephemera of the technological age with that of the post-industrial Midwest. This blending of time-adjacent degrading spheres creates a new interaction between these objects, talking about decay, ruin, glitch, loss, and distortion. These objects have a simultaneous specificity and ambiguity inherent to something covered in a dream-like layer of fog. This work engages in an ongoing dialogue with the ideas discussed in Walter Benjamin’s DreamKitsch, a seminal text on the state of dream-like ideas or possibilities and their decay when exposed to the tangible world. When removed from their realm of ambiguity, these objects become what Benjamin calls “Kitsch”; they are covered in metaphorical dust, removed from their romantic origins, and reinterpreted as mortal decaying things. This work, separated from the viewer, exists within this dream-like state of possibility. Marble white like the prolific statues of the past, it is dust-free from the rigid and historically grounded world in which we reside. Laden in synthetic light is a lost state of glitch and decay held just outside our full realization and reach.