CONDITION REPORT is an installation comprised of an artist book, found objects, a soundscape, and industrial lighting.
This project serves as a personal reflection of the mountainous coal regions of Eastern Pennsylvania where I grew up and the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of an obsolete industry. My ancestors immigrated and settled in this part of Pennsylvania from Eastern Europe, primarily Lithuania and Poland. They were miners of Anthracite coal in Pennsylvania until the mines closed in the early 20th century. The inhabitants and the landscape never truly recovered from this industrial past, and I find this to be compelling grounds for my research and visual art.
CONDITION REPORT archives childhood memories of this region along with my research of the anthracite mines and the many disasters which occurred therein. The overarching narrative expresses the events leading up to the death of my great grandmother, a Polish mother of 13 who outlived almost all her children. By the end of her life, she was smoking while using a medical oxygen tank, which inevitably exploded causing the second floor of the house to collapse in on her. I can vividly recall my childhood memories of the house and my fear and dislike of my great grandmother. In this work, I thread a parallel between the conditions of the mines, the recurrent underground fires, the spontaneous combustion of coal waste piles, and my memories of the dark, hazy room that she inhabited with the oxygen machine.
My imagery is rendered after hand-built maquettes made of paper, tape, and other found materials. More recently my models are covered in a heavy carborundum grit or sand, representing the fragility of these structural systems subjected to a harmful past and an industry which has abandoned them. The carborundum functions as an agent with which to bury something: a memory or difficult history which is purposefully forgotten. Through mezzotint, I slowly recover these forms from a black ground to echo the record of wear on the landscape and its local communities.
I would like to thank my Graduate Committee at the University of Wisconsin - Madison for their continued encouragement and support.
Fred Stonehouse, Julie Chen, Tomiko Jones, Emily Arthur, and John Hitchcock
