Ceding Ground II

Interactive installation for Situated Knowledge at Welcome Gallery, Charlottesville | Cob (sand, straw, clay); Central Virginia native seed mix | 5 × 3 × 25 feet (dimensions variable) | October 1-28, 2021

Ceding Ground II invoked Thomas Jefferson’s serpentine walls at the University of Virginia (minutes away from the gallery), which originally hid the enslaved workers behind the Academical Village. Each brick in the piece was embedded with native grass and wildflower seeds; a local ecotype seed mix well-suited to support biodiversity and ecological health in central Virginia.

Gallery visitors were invited to take a brick away with them and plant it. In dismantling the wall, the viewer transformed the structure–Ceding Ground II was not a piece advocating simple erasure, but rather one concerned with composting racist architectures and crumbling mythologies, converting seeds and clay into meadows of possibility. Over the duration of the exhibition, all 550 bricks were redistributed into the local landscape.

Ceding Ground II by Patrick Costello was commissioned by New City Arts and installed alongside interactive sculptures by Marisa Williamson and Sandy Williams IV. This exhibition is presented by The FUNd at CACF and sponsored by Lisa M. Draine.

Exhibition Statement (courtesy of the artists)

This exhibition brings together three artists with a shared interest in local, embodied, and situated knowledge. These artists have spent formative years in Charlottesville. They are perhaps haunted by it. Patrick Costello earned a BA in Printmaking from the University of Virginia in 2008. Sandy Williams IV earned a B.F.A. from UVA in 2016. Marisa Williamson was UVA’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist in Residence in 2018. She returned this year as an Assistant Professor of Visual Art with a research focus on Blackness.

Their works in the exhibition invite participation and interactivity. They are born of performative practices; queer and intersectional feminism, black feminist theory, and the ongoing contestation of monuments in public space and memory. The works aim to make visible the intangible. They are about shadows: shadows in architecture, historical narratives, and the collective consciousness around this specific place.

The dimensions of Sandy Williams IV’s sculpture were inspired by a Charlottesville cross burning that was recorded in local newspapers. The report is remembered thus: “A cross was burned in this neighborhood, at Cherry Avenue and Apple Street, near Ridge Street, on 15 August 1950. Three white men left the scene before they could be identified. The cross was made of burlap bags and boards. It was small at only 2 and a half feet high. Police made a routine investigation, but assistant Police Chief James E. Adams claimed that they could not determine the identity of the men or the reason for the cross burning."

By building a wall that curves, Thomas Jefferson estimated that 25% fewer bricks could be used as compared to a straight wall. The curved wall supports itself while being only one brick thick instead of two. The structure is inherently messy and unstable. Patrick Costello’s wall invokes Jefferson’s serpentine walls at the University of Virginia, believed to obscure the enslaved workers behind the Academical Village. Each brick in Costello’s wall is embedded with native perennial grass and wildflower seeds; local ecotype seed mixes uniquely well-suited to support biodiversity and ecological health in central Virginia. Gallery visitors are invited to take a brick away with them and plant it. In dismantling the wall, the viewer actively transforms the structure–this is not a piece advocating erasure, but rather one concerned with composting racist architectures and crumbling mythologies, making seeds and clay into thriving meadows of possibility.

Williamson’s sculpture is a plinth of air-dried clay. It supports a bed with a garden growing out of it. A version was installed once in 2018 on the Downtown Mall, again in 2019 outside the University Cemetery, and in a handful of galleries, always changing to better embody an elusive subject: the foremother. Over several years, Williamson has channeled the persona of Sally Hemings in her performance and multimedia work. This iteration features speculative artifacts specific to this site, Main Street, where Hemings likely spent her final years. The artifacts can be further activated using augmented reality.

Much of what the artists are doing is augmenting the visible reality with anachronistic apparata, spiritual equipment, tools of transformation. “It is in the intricacies of these visualization technologies in which we are embedded” Donna Haraway writes, “that we will find metaphors and means for understanding and intervening in the patterns of objectification in the world that is, the patterns of reality for which we must be accountable.”

The artists experiment with gestures that remediate erasure, taking into account the unaccounted-for. They engage in a certain type of feminist archaeology–a practice of dismantling that which was designed to hide and to obscure. At the same time, the works cannot hide the struggle. Our ‘problem,’ to summarize Donna Haraway’s thesis in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, is how to have, simultaneously, a traumatic knowledge of painful legacies and at the same time not be defined, disillusioned, and dismantled by that knowledge.

Costello maintains a small wildflower meadow on his Brooklyn roof. He hopes you use his work to start your own. Williamson looks forward to becoming a mother in December. Williams’ work never shies away from vulnerability and its immense power to transform and unite. In these ways and others, their practices and the works in this exhibition are about the future. They celebrate wild imagining and utopian possibility. At the heart of all three artists’ practices is collaboration. It is a time-tested strategy for cultivating what Haraway prescribes as a multiplicity of local knowledges; knowledges that they are thrilled to share in the presentation of this show.

Image credits: Derrick J. Waller and Ben Simon