GRACE SCHMIDT / BOSS, SPRING 2022, UIC, MFA
I consider my work to be non-fiction, materials based art. With my materials, I seek to know more than I seek to feel. I work with found objects in an archaeological manner, giving space for the object’s history and natural environment to be considered, bringing a rich timeline of past memories and future potentials into the present.
Over the course of this program, I have worked mostly with the metals from discarded pianos, burnt car parts from a fire started during a protest, and with biological materials from my own body after a surgery.
I’ve also created several models of the human body from various found objects. These models are an expression of the way I think about who I am as a person walking through the world. I am biological, electrical, chemical, mechanical material and I enjoy thinking about myself in this way: our thoughts are from neurons in our brains transmitting electricity through unchartable dense forests of connection. Love is through a limbic system. And the movement of a body is the constriction of a muscle. We are more than ideas. We are things.
In the materials around us - outside of our bodies - are the markings of our movements and actions. These are traces of our internal, abstract thoughts and feelings. Outside materials manifest the interior of the people, such as anger and insurgence that is demonstrated in the metal remnants of a car dealership in Kenosha - who lost their entire inventory to arson in 2020. When I visited, I collected 44 dash board circuits from burnt cars, with permission from the owners. The char of the fire is visual knowledge of the internal environment of those who started it.
In my found objects, (which are no more “found” than Christopher Columbus found America) I often leave the dust. Seeing the dust reminds us that this came from somewhere. And dust exhibits time. I used to treat found objects as raw materials - such as a painter treats a fresh tube of paint - using it to my discretion in the moment. But now I tend to honor what a thing was before it came into my presence as well.
I work with the ideas of beauty, love and redemption in my work.
I use beauty as an attractor to talk about typically aversive subjects - such as with the images I’ve taken of the fat of my body. I’ve highlighted the golden color of our human fat in these images by expanding the size of the images that color functions as an installation - similar to taking paint to the wall. Color, in this work, is intended to be a primary attractant, opening up space to approach what may have otherwise felt unapproachable.
Redemption comes into most of my works in the way of salvaging materials which have become unused or treated as refuse. REdemption, REcycling, Upcycling, and REbirth are not new concepts, as their names express, yet I believe they are still important concepts. It is on the shoulders of giants that we progress, not always with something brand new - but building upon what has been - toward what has yet to come.
And it is through love that I have attempted to break some of the powerful historical connections of material objects with the civil crimes of the past - such as the soap I created from the fat of my body. By replacing the historical contexts of hate with love, of disdain with high regard, I’ve created a new space around the soap - which had been formerly locked into a singular type of context. My soap is an extension of my biological body. As a mother, my body first began physically giving itself for my children at their conception in my womb. My body has protected and nourished my children physiologically, and my soap is a continuation of this - cleansing, nourishing and protecting them through the act of washing. It is a performance of love, service and care of my body for my children.
The hand-washing ceremony was filmed at City Methodist Church, in Gary, IN. This church is described in its own history as an imperfect house of God. I believe its current state of physical disarray embodies this well. It is a place of holy ground and worship, but as a broken establishment, the boarded up, crumbling structure materially exemplifies the broken establishments of power, politics, control and misuse.
Finally, in my most recent works, I have taken the metal harps from broken pianos, cut them up, melted them down, and cast them into new forms. I did this to bring philosophical questions about myself and about change to a physical location outside of myself. It has been an auto-theraputic, two year long project about the acceptance of tragedy giving birth to transformation.
Both the metal of the cubes and the fat of the soap retain in their physical materials the memories of the past, while today they become something new.
They each carry a potent past and an unwritten future - but it is here in the present that you and I decide what histories are carried - and what each will become.
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