Terroir
Terroir
To move through the geography of 21st century capital is to move through cities remade as assets. The earth divided into property, dissolved into dollars, euros, yen. Land liquefied. A city mapped and measured in price per square foot.
A pied-à-terre, a plot of ground, a handful of dirt.
The geological foundations of a city are its necessary other. A natural history gives rise to a civilization. No stone. No city.
London: city of clay. Fossilized mangrove swamps trapped within the blue-grey earth. Paris: city of chalk. Berlin: city of sand. On entering (with Napoleon), Stendhal would write: “In all the places that are unpaved, one’s foot goes down up to the ankle, and sand has turned the outskirts of the city into a desert … I do not know who had the idea to put a city in the midst of all this sand.”
Bedrock is an urban unconscious. A subterranean nature hidden except in moments of disruption. A foundation is poured, cable laid, pipes replaced. Stone is broken, earth unearthed, subsoil exposed. Or a park preserves the memory of a lost wilderness. A rocky outcrop in a public garden like an animal in a cage.
Each monochrome painting is made from the pulverized bedrock of a single city. A fragment of the original stone accompanies each painting.
Installation photography: Mark Woods
October 22 - November 21, 2015 at Foxy Production
