Sensing Connection to the Time Left

2018 Iceberg Gallery, Chicago

The transparent panels create a fence diagram based on a series of maps of the Illinois Basin prepared by the Illinois Geological Survey and useful primarily for oil geologists looking for oil shale. The sewn strata lines have been compressed and exaggerated in both dimensions in response to the complex and intimate space of Iceberg, but retain their internal spatial relationships while the whole configuration has been shifted 45 degrees counterclockwise (North is West). (Image credits: Jim Prinz)

Walking among, between, and through the transparent panels is by inference inhabiting the underground, moving through solid earth as if it was air, and experiencing the contrasts in spatial and temporal scales of one’s out-sized human body in relation to 15,000 feet of rock—an archive of accumulated and solidified time that is vulnerable now to explosion, poisoning, and extraction. The time left behind (in the archive of rock strata) and the time remaining (in our shared sense of an end) meet underground in a medium which is surprisingly airy, light, and full of ghosts. I thought that seeing other humans inhabiting the underground together might feel like visiting with those we have lost, but what I didn’t anticipate until the opening were also renewed connections with those who are still present, made possible in intimate rooms created by the arms of the fences.