October 3 – December 6, 2024
under/current is the 2024 University of Southern Maine Art Gallery fall exhibition. Featuring artist Stephanie Garon, this show uses video, sound, and mined rocks to transform our two-centuries-old building into an immersive artistic experience.
Stephanie Garon focuses on materials to investigate human collisions with the environment. She recently was given access to a rock core collection from a Gold Rush mining site from 1850 that sits between two Passamaquoddy reservations and five towns in eastern Maine. Cylindrical vessels each measuring a similar gauge, the cores’ smoothness terminates at rough, jagged ends reminiscent of the larger entity that they were extracted from. Uneven termini speak to the shapes the rock once held, breaking through a hubristic attempt to impose order on an unruly mass. The cores have been transformed from landscape to potential but unrealized commodity, and have come to rest in an interstitial space. And yet, a memory of their previous life is still visible for those who look. Neither here nor there, commodity nor landscape, entirely smooth or entirely jagged, they beg the question of what we do with our more than earthly environmental inheritance (lithium, a precious metal, is literally stardust), what is its promise to us, and ours to it.
under/current explores issues around land claim and mining’s impact on one local economy driven by fishing, clean water, and environmental stability. Themes of economic and ecological intertwinement can be viewed as a microcosm of the concerns that face many communities throughout the New England-Acadian Forest ecoregion. Approaching the project from a materials perspective allows Garon to create an immersive, site-specific installation with a humble solid at its center.
The artist considers the rock for where it intersects with another earthly inherited element: water. Permeated by concerns of security both corporal and economic, water is where extractive mining processes hold their most significant and potentially detrimental impact. When considering the effects of the proposed local mine, Garon interviewed those whose livelihoods place them in constant contact with water for bodily sustenance and economic surety. She spoke with kelp farmers and clam diggers and collaborated with earth scientists, geologists, and naturalists from NASA and the Urban Soils Institute to further learn about the extracted cores. The resulting exhibit toggles between macrocosmic climate-based phenomena and the hyper-local scale of individual lived experience.
Garon grounds her investigation with a collaborative sound piece created with members of the local Passamaquoddy tribe. Vibrations offer a distinct experience of elemental situatedness, adding another layer of sensorial experience to the exhibition. Utilizing techniques that place materials and community at the foreground of under/current’s interpretive lens, the artist creates a scientifically grounded artistic investigation into an environmental bequeathment that poses both opportunity and hazard to rural Maine communities. Many Maine towns are currently making decisions around lithium mining for the cell phones and car batteries that power our contemporary lives, underscoring these questions with an ever-increasing urgency. This exhibit provides a platform for audiences to contemplate how the environment coalesces with our everyday lived experience.
under/current draws attention to these cores and their ongoing journey, as well as what their potential transformation holds for our collective futures. The cores’ accumulation speaks in part to an ongoing humanistic project of quantifying the value of what we cannot see, that which lies beneath our feet.
— Kat Zagaria Buckley, Director of Art Exhibitions and Outreach
Download the exhibition catalog by clicking the image above.
This exhibition is made possible by the generosity of the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust and the Maine Humanities Council.
Above: Image courtesy of artist Stephanie Garon.