Falling Still

Falling Still, a collaboration with Nathaniel Stern, utilizes 200 cement-cast feathers as individual pixels to create a larger image across 6 planes. Each of these sculptures has been hand-poured into molds of actual feathers, exhibiting finely detailed quills on one side, and flat concrete surfaces on the other. They hang from the ceiling via discrete fishing lines, swinging, twisting and turning as viewers move around the 8 x 15 x 4 foot installation area. From all perspectives but one, the work floats between 1-dimensional lines, 2-dimensional planes and 3-dimensional pixels. View it exactly perpendicular to its planes, and all the work’s elements cohere into a bit-mapped image of a body, leaping through the air. While Falling Still is itself suspended between movement and stasis, it also moves and arrests us. The installation directs us in and around incongruous objects, through an improbable image, and across multiple dimensions.

Curated by Jennifer Johung

Download Falling Still booklet, with text by Jennifer Johung, as PDF (300 kb)

Production Team: Lucy Derikson, Caitlin Driver, Joe Grennier, Rachel Kedinger, Foster Stilp, Kent Watson
Photography: Naomi Shersty
Special thanks to: Jeremy Brown, Jim Charles, Frankie Flood, Kevin Giese, Elena Gorfinkel, Sarah Holden, Nicole Ridgway, Konstantin Sobolev, the Departments of Art + Design and Art History at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

Materials: concrete, steel, fishing line
Dimensions: 8′ x 15′ x 4′

9 images, 2010