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01. Sisyphus Wears a Tie
Location: Pennypack Park
Material: 400 LBS Iced brackish water from the Delaware Bay, button-up collar shirt, tie, music by Patsy Kline
2020
Pennypack Park— with Pennypack meaning deep or slow water in the Lenape language— is a green oasis placed within an industrial center in NE Philadelphia. Located within a half mile of this public park on the Delaware River is a prison, bird sanctuary, gun firing range, and the Metal Bank Superfund site. Located on historic Lenapehoking (Lenape land), the converging history, industrial complexes, and beauty contained in this public place is confounding. What is the meaning of this?
In response, brackish water collected from the estuary of the Delaware River was frozen into a 400 pound block of ice and transported upstream to Pennypack Park. Complicit and passive, a “pencil pusher” dressed in a button up shirt and tie, pushes the block of ice to expedite its melting. Reaching his physical and emotional limit, he knows not why he works, but relentlessly continues through the torment anyways.
Rooted in the absurdity and meaninglessness of the labor involved, Sisyphus Wears a Tie is a durational exercise in drudgery, futility, and complicity. It questions the myth of progress and explores the affect of unchecked industry on nature and culture. What results from this relentlessness?
02. Ayn
Cast fiberglass, strontium aluminate
Casts of 1500 and 500 LBS boulders
2019
Ayn is a site-specific work that responds to this historic forested area in Virginia. The work is cast from boulders found on-site (4 total) and installed throughout the forest underbrush. During the day, the casts appear as if they are made of a translucent quartz. As day turns to night and the sounds of forest shift, the boulder begin to naturally glow. This transition presents the question— what is alive?
03. Remnants (solo exhibition)
Mixed media
Installation views include: Blue Sunrise, Study of a Blue Sunrise, Hyperobject, the performance video of Sisyphus Wears a Tie, and a study from Eikos Mythos
2020
As a type of shrine, Remnants assembles cracking mud from Vermont and Pennsylvania, 400 lbs of water from the Delaware Estuary, Icelandic winter light, a Pencil Pusher, and music by Patsy Kline into sculpture, video, projection, and framed artwork. These elements merge into larger themes relating to complicity, absurdity, the myth of progress, cycle, silence, spirituality, and climate change.
The work is a contribution to a larger conversation about our changing relationship to the natural, and arrives through questions like— how do we enter into greater reciprocity with the world, each other and non-humankind? How do we facilitate practices that mend our relationship with nature to imagine a more interdependent future? These questions serve as a contemplative architecture that reacts to and builds from a re-imagined reciprocity with the Earth.
04. Blue Sunrise
Icelandic winter morning light, cast mulberry paper, time
Variable dimensions
2020
Blue Sunrise is a type of painting that uses Icelandic light instead of pigment. The light is captured with a video camera pointed towards the sky in Iceland during a winter sunrise. Over a two-hour period, the sky at this time of year changes from a deep blue quality to white and back to blue. There are only four hours of light during the winter.
In response to this light cycle, fourteen sections of time throughout the four-hour day were chosen to be layered on top of one another. Using projection mapping software, the captured Icelandic light was mapped onto the slightly convex form made from cast mulberry paper. The work compresses the fourteen different sections of light and time into one visual and temporal plane to form a visual corridor of changing blue light. When viewed, the ephemeral quality of Icelandic winter light can continually be experienced in a single place and time.
05. The Blue of Distance
“Blue is a color of depth, of distance. A quality of boundlessness. Blue like the sky, or feeling. “out of the blue.” Singing the blues. Ocean blue. A blue void. Rebecca Solnit writes- “the world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost… The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains… blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.”
– Rebecca Solnit
Cast fiberglass, plexiglass, acrylic, plaster, cast paper, bondo
23″ x 22″ x 7″
2021
This is convex wall hanging sculpture diffuses the light and colors it contains. As the viewer moves around it, the blue becomes softer. From from the side, the color disappears. Staring into the center feels like gazing into nothingness— like a psychic, transcendent falling. The blues used are the true colors of the winter sky within an Icelandic sunrise, which I collected in 2019 for the work Blue Sunrise.
06. Hyperobject
Glacially ground earth with high silt ratio from the Northeastern United States, bisque fired ceramic, time
7″ x 60″ x 60″
2020
07. Stone
Anacostia river stone, light, white room
72″ X 120″ X 96″
2018
The rock I collected from the Anacostia River emits a line of light that interacts with the surrounding architecture to activate a previously undefined space. The installation reveals a secret life and invites participants to contemplate the life within a thing typically thought of as inanimate.
08. Metaphorical Honey
Icelandic clay, light, time, net factory
6″ X 60″ X 60″
2019
Collected from the mountainside of Seydisfjordur, this patch of earth is embedded in The Net Factory’s floor. Through the duration of the work, the earth cracks to reveal a line of light that emanates from its center.
09. Eikos Mythos
Pigmented minerals
8″ X 36″ X 15″
2019
Eikos Mythos is an ongoing body of work that explores geological time scales, change, erosion, and the intersections of scientific process and art-making. It investigates ways of knowing through intuition, sampling, and collection. The work stems from the question— How do we know the things we know?
10. Remember Being Stone?
Anacostia River stone, steel, “Cool Water,” by Marty Robbins
60” x 80” x 18”
2018
Using sound, stone, and steel, Remember Being Stone? is an investigation in the animacy of a stone collected from the Anacostia River. As the viewer approaches, the Song “Cool Water” can be heard gently emanating from the stone referencing colonial history and extraction.
11. Earthwomb
Work is displayed as a 2-channel projection on loop
30 minute performance, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” by the Ink Spots
2019
Earthwomb was developed while I was living and working in Seydisfjordur— a small town located within the east fjords of Iceland. The work responds to the questions— how can we create new rituals that engage the ground to generate connection with the Earth? How can ritual serve as a tool to cultivate a more interdependent future?
Earthwomb captures a ritual I invented and performed in effort to return to the land and considers how we may create meaningful spaces in land that illuminate our reciprocity with the Earth. Played to the ghostly lullaby of “I Dont Want to Set the World on Fire” by the Ink Spots, the two-channel video references a child in a womb and weaves this intimate relationship into the surrounding fjord. The work explores the ground’s ability to heal, protect, and sustain, while exposing our fragile and vulnerable interdependence with Earth.
Making of Earthwomb below.
12. Habitus
Habitus Excerpt. Sound on
Performative sculpture
Video is looped during exhibition
Dancer: Shawn Stone
2018
Habitus is a performative sculpture that activates with movement and creates gentle sounds reminiscent of rain. The visual effects produced by the movement allude to prairie grass blowing in the wind, a chestnut seed, sea anemone, or a being existing in the inbetween.
13. Sefer Series (4 total)
Cast Mulberry Paper, Ink
72″ x 72″ x 5″
The sculptural drawing is slightly concave and subtly warps perception.
2020
Sefer is the Hebrew word for book with roots in the word sifriyah or library.
Through cyclic repetition, I draw from the center and spiral outwards. An accidental shake compounds over time into waves that undulate throughout the paper. By embracing my mistakes, the marks grow in unpredictable ways. I relinquishing control to become a vessel through which the drawing flows through me and creates itself. An imagined fluid-like topography unfolds into valleys, peaks, and plaines. Through this process, I begin to grasp how landscapes may form, weather patterns function, and cultural movements explode.
Making of Sefer Below
14. M-emet
Shenandoah river water, steel, time
40″ x 34″ x 72″
2019
The word emet is a Hebrew word that comprises of three Hebrew letters: Aleph, Mem, and Tav. In Jewish teaching, Aleph symbolizes the past, Mem symbolizes the present and is associated with pregnancy and water, and Tav symbolizes the future. Together — Aleph, Mem, and Tav spell emet which means truth. As the water runs, it degrades and rusts the steel surface. A cyclic transformation occurs— each material changing the other through time.
15. Lighthouse
Steel, water, light, white room
68″x 32″ x 32″
2017
On top of the sculpture is a pool of water above eye level. Underneath is a hidden electronic assembly programmed to move the water every 35 seconds. The movement of the water is translated onto the four surrounding gallery walls via lights embedded in the top corners of the sculpture. The inverted obelisk produces an immersive phenomenon much like an aurora borealis that surrounds the viewer entirely. The work was created to hold space for contemplation and to be a beacon for reflection.
16. Intersect Series
Reclaimed redwood tower, light
Variable dimensions (15 total)
2017
Each Intersect sculpture takes on a strange yet familiar animal nature. The sculptures use light, shadow, and minimal tapered sculptural lines to activate space and invite investigation.
17. Actus Primus
Wood, rust water finish, aircraft cable
18′ x 30′ x 10′
During my walks through the grounds and forests at Salem Art Works Sculpture Park, I was interested by the curves that the trees create by growing and bending towards the light. Actus Primus is a reaction to my many encounters with the bending tree forms there.
18. Mach XXIII
Reclaimed pine, white oak, steel
20′ x 35′ x 6′ (variable)
2016
In the mountain forests of the Pacific Northwest, large softwood trees are felled by powerful gusts of wind during storms. Their large cavernous roots and their network of life become visible. Seeing their interconnected root systems many times taller than myself and the long, teetering cantilevered trunks always remind me that my home is in those roots.
I created Mach XXIII in an effort to return home after I had left. The curve of Mach XXIII is created through repetitive stacking, individually cutting, and adhering isosceles triangles together. The exterior is carved and the interior is left raw.
19. Ante-chamber
Wood, light, iridescent medium, my dog’s ash
120″ x 30″ x 30″
2019
In Jewish practice, we place a stone on the graves of our dead loved ones. The material of stone reminds us that love is eternal. The weight of the stone reminds us of the weight they had in our lives.
The creation of Ante-chamber was a response to multiple coinciding deaths: the funeral of my oldest living relative, taking place one day after the mass shooting of the L’Simcha congregation in Pittsburg in October 2018, and the premature death of my dog. Drawing from the death ritual above, I sculpted this large, black and iridescent object to resemble an important stone I collected. The object hovers over my dogs ashes.
This work is about processing grief. The object and installation are relics of this process.
20. Attend: The Space Between
Mixed media
120″ x 156″ x 48″
2019
Referencing Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”, Attend: The Space Between is a work that examines the phenomenon of two separate objects dissolving into one another’s centers. As viewers walk towards the center, they encounter a quality of merging only visible via this central location.
MONROE ISENBERG 