Franciscan/Manhattan Formation

Photo installation, b&w photograph, 14 ft. h x 22 ft.w, 1998.

Left: Franciscan Complex, northern California coast, Cretaeous era

Center: Franciscan/Manhattan Formation, solo exhibition, Dialogues with Nature, Lance Fung Gallery, New York, NY, 1998

Right: "Manhattan Formation," Broadway, New York, NY, Holocene era.

Formally and conceptually elated to the Lanscape Projection (for an Unknown Window), 1998-2001, and Stratigraphic Column I-III, 2002-2006, series, Franciscan/Manhattan Formation, explores the relationship of natural geologic structures and architectural 'geologic' structures. The perimiter image of Franciscan/Manhattan Formation is taken from Cretaeous Era formations of intensely deformed radiolarian chert beds of the Franciscan Complex on the northern California coast. The radiolarian chert was originally deposited in abyssal, deep sea conditions in the Pacific Ocean, subsequently defromed and accreted and onto the American continent by plate tectonics during the Cretateous Era.

The center space of Franciscan/Manhattan Formation is a painted plaster wall in the Lance Fung gallery in SoHo. The wall is structurally and materially related to the building housing the gallery, composed of northeastern American continent sedimentary and/or metamoprhic rock, "deposited" by human agency during the Anthropocene/Holocene Era. This depositional process is part of a series of processes analogously related to geologic processes by the term, anthroturbation. Other works that examine issues of architectural/geologic anthroturbation include: Holcene Terrace, 1999, Holocene Passage, 2002, Original Depositional Environment I & II, 2001 and Protogaea Civica I-III (Franciscan Formation/San Francisco, CA), 2004-2006

Dialogues with Nature press release