Project Description
An image of an ancient Sumerian terra-cotta liver device used for prophetic rituals, the uncanny geographic similarity of the Tigris/Euphrates and Sacramento/American river systems, the Sumerian, Epic of Gilgamesh and a past interest in cuneiform tablets formed the beginnings of our explorations for Divinations, developed for Fertile Ground, NCECA 2022, Sacramento, CA. Divinations underwent numerous evolutions in our exploration. We initially proposed an exhibition and supportive panel that uses a system of updated Sumerian-like clay tablets to explore salient questions and synergies about civilization, the environment and history. The exhibition was selected by NCECA for implementation, the panel was not. In Divinations, the exhibition, the “Fertile Crescent” of ancient Mesopotamia, born from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the first city states where substantive agriculture, irrigation and civic governance was initiated, becomes analogous to Sacramento, as the nexus of Central Valley agrarianism, the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, the capital of California and Fertile Ground.
Initial ideas for Divinations included the use of an improvised gallery space as a kind of operations headquarters and library, where we considered proposes animated map and exploration system overlaying Sacramento streets with those of ancient Sumerian cites, creating associations and provocations between the Paleolithic, Neolithic and mid-Anthropocene. Updated clay tablets in cruciform and contemporary language, from the library and theoretically “geo-cached” on site were intended to provide clues and symbols for the participants to actively engage with Sacramento, within a historical and cultural feed-back loop animated by data on the tablets. Terra cotta, cuneiform/stelae, fitted into bespoke ponchos and garments made from geo-textiles and other agricultural fabrics were to be made available to be worn by our visitors as they tour the city. This Oort clothing was inspired by patterns found in Diderot’s Encyclopedia (a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts we explored in Diderot/Forrest/Roloff, NCECA 2019, Portland, OR) and form a ‘walking library’ which propels the gallery into the street, sees the visitors as the disseminators of art and cultural investigators.
As we delved deeper into the Epic of Gilgamesh and came to grips with the exhibition site in the Sheraton Grand Hotel, new narratives of interest and logistical issues were exposed. Our ideas morphed into a focus on the proto-biblical drama of Gilgamesh hunting and slaying the monster Humbaba, who in our interpretation was the primal representative of nature representing the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer condition of humanity. His slaying, it may be imagined, gave birth to the unfettered Neolithic city-state, the origins of sedentary agriculture, monotheism and the sensibility of resource plundering that rules our contemporary world. A central element of the Divinations exhibition is a giant ceramic liver (from the Trojan Horse?) based on the original terra-cotta liver device. A network of extruded clayt tunnel/passages corresponding to a journey through the unconscious corresponds to a map/floorplan of a temple/library complex in Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city. A rectilinear cedar armature, laden with dark fabric images, echo’s the forest the drama unfolds within. Three dreams experienced by Gilgamesh in his epic, expanded its narrative into a complex morality play of intrigue and lost immortality. We added a fourth dream: “Purple Rain," a prolonged shower of purple meteors (laced with tryptophan, the sleep potion) that echo’s the science and music of the future (a prophecy..) with the power of rebirth, the sleep of reason, purple haze - humanity is pre-loaded to make a choice..” Later in the Epic, it is revealed of the dream: “its potential is forgotten, absorbed into his (Gilgamesh’s, and hence Anthropocene humanity) unconscious..” This narrative and our reserch was explored in Divinations/It begins..., a large bound compliation of text and images included as part of the installation. Here as in our project, Two Sites with a Similar Problem, NCECA 2019, Minneapolis, MN, popular culture with ceramics as instrument, in the form of Prince, David Bowie and Jimmy Hendrix, each play the roll of the shaman: their creative, enigmatic channeling of the unconscious and the primal disguised as complex odes to love and loss.
OortCloudX is a proponent of a ceramics triad, which we believe to be an historiography of craft, an industrial/geological convergence, and the discipline as a means to investigate our modern circumstance. Using ceramics as our vehicle and protagonist, our exhibition connects our ongoing interests in environment, geography and knowledge to ancient Sumeria and now Sacramento. Great Lakes, our NCECA exhibition in 2014, Milwaukee, WI, experimented with representations of ships, waterways and the destabilizing effects of invasive species in our largest freshwater lakes. Our continuing interest in the environment and landscapes will reappear as the incarnation of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of Sumeria, which become a generative twin to the Sacramento and American Rivers. OortCloudX does not think of its work as humourless, but instead filled with fictions, flares, spurious connections and cheek.
Acknowledgments for Exhibition Support and Assistance:
Marie MacInnis
Aurelia Emma
Ann Wettrich
Mark Thompson
Petern Henry
Fenn Martini
Additional thanks to:
NCECA and the Sheraton Grand Hotel
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