Early Bird Tickets are now on sale for Promument, Monument Lab’s Annual Fundraising Event, Awards Ceremony, and Party. Join us for an evening of music, art, food, and celebration on May 23, 2024 at the Independence Visitor Center.
Slow Motion, an indoor and outdoor exhibition curated by Monument Lab at Grounds For Sculpture (GFS), reimagines the material possibilities of public memory. The exhibition will feature the work of Billy Dufala, Ana Teresa Fernández, Colette Fu, Omar Tate, and Sandy Williams IV who make their mark through unconventional materials and processes for sculpture. By experimenting with the life cycles of collective memory, the exhibition invites artists as well as visitors to play with the central question, “how can we remake our relationship with monuments?”
While traditional approaches to monument-making privilege durability, solidity, and myths of permanence, Slow Motion tests the material bounds of monumentality while foregrounding the urgency of deliberately slowing down. Each artist works with and through unconventional materials, embracing the narrative possibilities of material impermanence and the pleasures of slow looking. The artists present an array of multi-sensorial engagements with monuments and their lifespans, ultimately sparking questions about the very essence of matter itself; here, materials are not just a medium for monumental work—they are also potent makers of meaning in their own right, functioning as symbols of specific places, memories, and feelings.
The exhibition presents an array of commemorative practices in which monuments come to matter through bodily performance, movement, consumption, and even digestion. To that end, the featured artists offer playful approaches to monument-making. While some artists experiment with various compostables, others stage decay—not as a sign of failure or an aesthetic fixation on the passage of time, but rather, as material and temporal alternatives for how communities might build their collective futures. The exhibition contemplates the relations that are needed to sustain public memories, without degrading our environments and with respect for both human and non-human life.
By re-examining how we might remake our relationship to monuments, Slow Motion invites visitors to slow down and ultimately generate new ways of moving within and throughout their environments. Monument Lab will prepare participatory activities on site for public engagement with both the artworks and the concerns of the exhibition. What results is a series of whimsical, delicious models for public monuments that aim to sustain memory through experimentation and an ethics of kinship.
About the artists
Billy Dufala is an interdisciplinary artist in Philadelphia and co-founder of Recycled Artists in Residence (RAIR). Dufala’s practice offers a playful and critical approach to the twin problems of material waste and exploitative land use. Future Futures, a site-specific sculpture made of recycled aluminum bales, is a temporary monument that functions as both a material commodity and a staged “performance.” Following the closing of the exhibition, the sculpture will be dismantled and these materials will be reintroduced into the commodities market.
Ana Teresa Fernández is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Mexico, now based in San Francisco, who will exhibit her work SHHH. This 7-foot-high series of letters is covered in 1,800 suspended golden acrylic mirrors which both react to and reflect back their surrounding environment. SHHH is a monument to the silence of cultures and habitats as sea levels rise and coastlines disappear, a future memorial to what will inevitably be lost.
Colette Fu is an artist and a paper engineer born in New Jersey and based in Philadelphia, best known for the creation of pop-up books. For this exhibition, Fu will create Noodle Mountain, a large-scale pop-up book that illuminates the long history of noodles, a complex culinary connection to experiences of immigration, labor, and collective identity formations in the Chinese diaspora. In her work, Fu has long considered the material life cycles of archives and experimented with the materialization of stories and memories through non-conventional practices.
Omar Tate, who is well-known for his culinary creations, identifies as an artist who uses food as one of his many mediums. His work is rooted in the values of nourishment and the reclamation of Black food traditions and cultural aesthetics that can be experienced through his Philadelphia-based grocery and catering business, Honeysuckle Projects, which Tate co-owns and operates alongside his wife Cybille St. Aude-Tate. For Slow Motion, Tate will present Blue, a 16-month residency that will feature unique dinner menus and a recycled bottle tree and garden installation. In addition, custom food options from Honeysuckle Projects will be offered at GFS’s culinary spaces. Blue will speak to the way that smells, taste, and sight can be poetic entry points to share memories.
Sandy Williams IV is a multidisciplinary artist who will also create new work for this exhibition connected to The Wax Monuments series. In this ongoing project, recognizable public monuments that are made in traditional and durable materials are recast in wax and positioned on a stage inspired by the steps from the Lincoln Memorial. These monuments, which normally convey a sense of permanence and immutability, will be periodically melted throughout the exhibition. This iteration of Williams’ work offers an approach to public memory that “hold[s] space for disenfranchised public memories and visualiz[es] frameworks of emancipation and shared agency.”