Filling MASS MoCA’s largest gallery with a massive cascading wave — swooping curves of felt that will slowly change color throughout a ten-month exhibition cycle, Anya Gallaccio creates a new commission for MASS MoCA’s largest gallery, Building 5, referencing the built environment and the landscape surrounding the museum.
From 1860 to 1943, MASS MoCA’s buildings were home to Arnold Print Works, which dyed and printed textiles. One of the world’s leading producers, Arnold Print Works used Building 5 for dyeing and drying fabric.
In 1850, about twenty miles south of North Adams, writer Herman Melville moved his family to Arrowhead farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, offering a distant view of Mount Greylock, [...] inspiration for Moby Dick (1851). In chapter LXVII, Melville [....] asks, “What and where is the skin of the whale?” trying to distinguish skin from blubber and alluding to the impossibility of fully comprehending a thing so big that you are always either on top of it, or enveloped by it.
Gallaccio’s wave will begin at the back of the two-story gallery, putting the viewers virtually on top of the mass, and gently undulate to the floor at the gallery entrance. Its form will create tunnels so that museum visitors can wander beneath the mass of material. Above this thick surface of white felt will be a system of plumbing, to release controlled amounts of indigo dye onto the material, as if inscribing wounds into the skin. The dye will saturate, run, and dry over the course of the exhibition — eventually turning the white felt from pale blue to almost black — transforming the material into a colossal color field painting, a rolling mountain landscape, or even the hump of a whale.
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Gallaccio’s exhibition reminds us that nature and industry are in constant dialogue, and that both — like the whale itself — are so formless that the ability to understand their totality is futile. The artist’s work is the skin of the whale, tracing history and the present through a constant state of becoming, growing until it fills space to its boundaries and beyond.
Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.