Sarah Fetterman: Past Selves

Exhibition Website

Jun 17 2017 - Jul 29 2017

From June 17 to July 29, we will feature artist Sarah Fetterman, a welder and woodworker, with collaborators Hannah Simmons, a digital artist who utilizes coding and dance, and Jack Christoforo, a software designer. Past Selves is a multi-sensory experience through performance and technology with an additive memory arc that runs through the 6-week exhibit.

In Past Selves, Simmons is covered in flour and her movement in the gallery is recorded via black tar paper on the walls. As she moves, a white powdery shadow of her body is left in her wake, the flour capturing the back of a leg leading to the ghost of her foot’s arch and the curve of her shoulder as she turns.
At an angle to the performance, a viewer interacts by inserting both elbows into bronze armrests and the natural conductivity of the human body completes the circuit between skin and sculpture, activating a camera to record the performance and room. 

By recording viewings, a memory is generated which is continually overwritten. Simmons’ software layers each recorded “memory” over the previous recordings to form a single ghostly record. With each performance, Simmons’ repetitive actions will meld into previous ones, stabilizing her presence in memory and video recording. The final recording revealing only the blackness of the walls and the flour traces, with a jacket sleeve here, a peering neck there—blurring back to the unseen beginning. The oil from skin transforms the bronze with a patina, storing the memory of the individual in the material of the sculpture as well.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Installation
  • American
  • Contemporary
  • Sarah Fetterman
  • Hannah Simmons
  • Jack Christoforo

Exhibition Venues & Dates