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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 patch of green nestled in an industrial hub of absurdity. Located within a half mile of this public park on the Delaware River in NE Philadelphia is a prison, a bird sanctuary, a 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?
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 American pride in a total work 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 speckled across the forest underbrush. During the day, they appear as quartz ghosts of their original form. As day turns to night and the sounds of forest shift, something peculiar happens. The boulder’s inner life is slowly revealed. This transition asks us to consider 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
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.
As a contribution to a larger, collective conversation, the work arrives through questions— how do we enter into greater reciprocity with the world, each other and non-human beings? How do we facilitate practices that un-sever and reimagine a future based on thrivability? These questions serve as a contemplative architecture that reacts to and builds from a re-imagined reciprocity with the Earth.
04. The Blue of Distance
Cast fiberglass, plexiglass, acrylic, plaster, cast paper, bondo
23″ x 22″ x 7″
2021
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… for many years I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. 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.”- Field Guide to Getting Lost.
This is a convex object that diffuses the light and colors it contains. As you move around it, the blue becomes softer and from the side, the color disappears. Staring into the center, feels like staring into nothingness- like a psychic, transcendent falling. The blues used are the true colors of the sky in Iceland, which I collected in 2019
05. Stone
Anacostia river stone, light, white room
72″ X 120″ X 96″
2018
Stone is a silent conversation with a voiceless world, excavating social geological history and attending to the animacy of material. The rock emits a line of light that interacts with the surrounding architecture and activates a previously undefined space. The installation reveals a secret life- creating room for stillness and contemplative participation.
06. 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. For more information please watch.
07. 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 sampling and collecting, and stems from the question— where do mythologies come from?
08. 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 considers how we may create meaningful spaces with land to 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.
09. 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.
More information— Video Review of Habitus
10. 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.
MONROE ISENBERG 