My recent photographic work questions our surreal era and the voracious cycle of consumer culture. Ship Splitter is a photographic series of works begun in 2019. For these photographs, I created small sculptures and dioramas in my studio from shipment detritus such as plastic and cardboard, positioning them to evoke futuristic seascapes.
This process arose from my previous work bridging the gulches between intentions and outcomes. I worked with friends in different coastal locations recording their response to images of folded paper mimicking the shape of a sail. Through a number of intentional situations involving a sail from a ship I documented the participant's response in various landscapes. This work is entitled Biography of Catastrophe an investigation of form which began an inquiry into surrealism.
Before the Ghost #1, (2021/22 ) Versions created originally for group shows “Prescient Surfaces” at Rocky Mountain College, Billings, Montana and “Hospitality - counterbalance venom” Cade Center for Fine Arts, Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, MD
Archival print from the series Ship Splitter, 2019
Archival print from the series Ship Splitter
Archival print from the series Ship Splitter
Archival print from the series Ship Splitter
From the photographic series Biography of Catastrophe
From the photographic series Biography of Catastrophe
From the photographic series Biography of Catastrophe
From the photographic series Biography of Catastrophe
From the photographic series Biography of Catastrophe
From the photographic series Biography of Catastrophe
While working with the sail imagery I came across a painting by Surrealist painter Kay Sage (1898-1963, entitled In the Third Sleep and was entranced by her desolate landscapes featuring sail-like shrouds. I imagined contemporary landscapes inspired by her paintings by creating maquettes to get a sense of scale and feasibility. The maquettes were later used to create large towers to inhabit various landscapes. Here are images documenting the various processes of fabrication, maquettes, digital sketches and architectural renderings.
Sketch for Buoyant Force 50’ sculpture installed in Reston Town Center commissioned by Greater Reston Arts Center
Paint application for Buoyant Force courtesy of Paint Tech, Inc. January 2020
Whiting-Turner and Paint Tech, Inc. at Arcwel's shop December 2019 discuss hauling, rigging and painting of Buoyant Force
Kaleb Norman, Howard Connelly, Will Bowers at Arcwel’s shop attaching sail sculpture to main structure of Buoyant Force.
Documentation of Buoyant Force Fabrication at Arcwel. Amos Moses walking to the right of steel sculpture fabrication. Image credit: Will Bowers of Arcwel, Rockville, MD. Fabrication team: Will Bowers, Amos Moses, Dave Higgins, Courtland Harkness, Harry Mayer, Chas Colburn and Howard Connelly Design
Geoff Lewis and Victoria Myrick, Architecture Inc.
Twenty foot sculpture installed at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, NY, 2015
Digital rendering of idea for Tomorrow is Never, unrealized, 2015
Extensive dialogue with circumstance is often. Intentions do not go as planned. I draw from happenstance to purposely undermine the originally planned narrative.
Gallery installations and site specific sculptures
Installation for exhibition with ATLANTIKA COLLECTIVE: APPROACHING EVENT HORIZONS at Mason Exhibitions, Arlington, VA
Party Popper / Plague Tower draws connections between the excessive consumption of materials, the sway of US political deal-making regarding the climate crisis and reflects on the 17th and 18th-century commemorative plague towers, constructed to ward off future European epidemics.
150’ Hawser, Ribbon, Ink
Storefront installation at 41 West, Hancock, MD showcasing previous works.
Installation at VisArts, Rockville, Maryland, 2021. Susan Main Curator
Catalog by Ann Burke Daly here
Craddock - Terry Gallery, Riverviews Art Space, Lynchburg, Virginia 2021
The Iridescent Yonder is a reimagining of elements from artist Sue Wrbican’s prior installations integrated with paintings made by family and friends. The new configuration of sails will act as viewing stations for a painting forecasting a different world Fragile Rainbow, by Claire McConaughy (2021) and a sculptural relief comprised of discarded plastic, Oil Tanker, originally created by Matt Wrbican, Phil Rostek and James Nelson (1991).
More info here
Buoyant Force commissioned by Greater Reston Art Center and Installed in Reston Town Center January 2020.
This 50-foot steel sculpture is inspired by the paintings of American Surrealist Kay Sage (b. 1898, Albany, New York; d. 1963, Woodbury, Connecticut). Sage is recognized for her paintings of scaffolded structures and furled fabric in desolate, ominous landscapes. The sculpture is constructed of steel pipe commonly used to transport natural gas. However, the pipes you see here have been redirected from their intended purpose and now, out of circulation, hold nothing but air.
More information can be found here
Night view of Well Past the Echo featuring the installation "Small Warning" Greater Reston Art Center, Reston, VA 2017. Rachel Jones, philosopher, speaks of the work here. Molly Donovan, Curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC speaks of the work here (pt. 1) and here (pt. 2) Click here for Sue W. in conversation with curator Lily Siegel (part 1) and (part 2)
Another view of Well Past the Echo 2017
Well Past the Echo detail, maquette for "Flag Forest" 2017
Sail Study in preparation for Well Past the Echo 2017
In the Third Interation, The Transitional Object, Lululemon Loft, Georgetown, Washington, DC 2017
Installation for Like Fine Wine, la Bodega Gallery, Baltimore, MD 2016
Volunteers for The Eventual Outcome of an Instant at Seligmann Center, Sugarloaf, NY 2015
The Eventual Outcome of an Instant, Seligmann Center, Sugarloaf, NY 2015
Continue the Temporary and It Becomes Forever, Zizek Studies Conference, University of Cincinnati, OH 2014
Two narratives overlap in Biography of Catastrophe and the Eventual Outcome of an Instant. The work is a documentation of a shift from one time and place to another. One of the sails featured in the book is used as the cover so that readers may hold the material being referenced in the narrative. The varied covers make each book a unique work in an edition of fifty with the title embroidered into the sail. Available Fall 2017.
Book on pedestal for solo show Well Past the Echo, Greater Reston Art Center, 2017
Group exhibition with members of the Atlantika Collective: Mark Isaac, Gabriela Bulisova, Todd Forsgren, Yam Chew Oh, Katie Kehoe, Billy Friebele. Curatorial Essay by María Alejandra Sáenz
Collaborative operation with Victoria Crayhon, Laure Drogoul, Erin Devine, Jackie Hoysted, Julia Bloom and Susan Hostetler. We employed the screamers of the Floating Lab Collective and iceberg imagery created by Victoria Crayhon from her research trip to Iceland and used them in the Climate March in April 2017, Washington, DC. Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed us and you can see it here at the 3:52:18 mark. The screamers projected a soundtrack of seismic sounds of icebergs melting with whistling wind mixed by Sue Wrbican and Edgar Endress.
During the winter of 2008 Mary Carothers and I froze a car into a solid block of ice in Michigan, the state of the birthplace of the automobile industry. The project took place during the Winter Carnival at Michigan Tech University, in Houghton, located on the western side of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We worked with students, faculty and community members in dialogue about industry and the environment.
More information: The Frozen Car
George Mason University photography students examined lantern slides illustrating various components of steam powered electricity plants at the turn of the century and created imagery addressing the words “water” and “power.” The images were displayed in light boxes with Silvana Straw's poetry and exhibited at Latela DC Gallery and GMU's Creative Writing department annual event Fall for the Book. More on this project and the student participants exhibited at Latela DC here and the write-up at George Mason University here.
The Floating Lab Collective is a group of artists working collaboratively on social research through public and media art projects in Washington DC, as well as nationally and internationally. They experiment with the aesthetics of direct action in crafting responses to specific places, communities, issues and circumstances.
More information: Floating Lab Collective
Photographs featured in Global Activism: Art and Conflict in the 21st Century MIT Press, Peter Weibel, ed. 2015
We recorded the screams of the public and composed them into soundtracks for the amplification devices "screamers" and played them in front of the New York Stock Exchange, the banks and the Treasury Department.
