Cradlers
Sept 23, 2025-April 4, 2026
in Up/Rooted Curated by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas
Sept 23, 2025-April 4, 2026
in Up/Rooted Curated by Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas
Cradlers, 2025
Stainless steel, mild steel, fossiliferous limestone blocks (Devonian Period, 419-359 mya, Hudson Valley, New York), compressed post-consumer stainless steel (Queens, Brooklyn, tri-state area), stainless steel hardware.
312” × 96” × 132” (792 × 244 × 335 cm)
Fossiliferous limestone blocks are hoisted on mirrored stainless steel tubes along a curved spinal line, each positioned to appear caught mid-rotation, the ancient marine fossils embedded in their surfaces visible as compressed traces of prehistoric seas. Sourced through Facebook Marketplace from a demolished Hudson Valley agricultural property, the limestone vessels are cradled by stainless steel forms combined with cooling louvers salvaged from a Queens building’s ventilation system. The mirrored tubes double and fragment the stone surfaces, pulling sky and riverfront into the work’s vertebral architecture while the louvers wrap and contain each block. This site-responsive installation responds to the park’s foundation of displaced Manhattan sediments, creating a mechanical circulatory system where industrial seconds collapse into geological epochs. The work operates from an understanding of matter as inherently vital, possessed of immanent force that participates in historical transformation. What seems to cradle also crushes; what promises preservation enables fundamental alteration. Creating a contact zone where heterogeneous elements enter into dynamic relationships, the installation invites viewers beneath its imposing structure to consider how we are cradled within systems we cannot fully perceive, infrastructures of extraction and circulation that interpenetrate our bodies at scales both massive and molecular.
Stainless steel, mild steel, fossiliferous limestone blocks (Devonian Period, 419-359 mya, Hudson Valley, New York), compressed post-consumer stainless steel (Queens, Brooklyn, tri-state area), stainless steel hardware.
312” × 96” × 132” (792 × 244 × 335 cm)
Fossiliferous limestone blocks are hoisted on mirrored stainless steel tubes along a curved spinal line, each positioned to appear caught mid-rotation, the ancient marine fossils embedded in their surfaces visible as compressed traces of prehistoric seas. Sourced through Facebook Marketplace from a demolished Hudson Valley agricultural property, the limestone vessels are cradled by stainless steel forms combined with cooling louvers salvaged from a Queens building’s ventilation system. The mirrored tubes double and fragment the stone surfaces, pulling sky and riverfront into the work’s vertebral architecture while the louvers wrap and contain each block. This site-responsive installation responds to the park’s foundation of displaced Manhattan sediments, creating a mechanical circulatory system where industrial seconds collapse into geological epochs. The work operates from an understanding of matter as inherently vital, possessed of immanent force that participates in historical transformation. What seems to cradle also crushes; what promises preservation enables fundamental alteration. Creating a contact zone where heterogeneous elements enter into dynamic relationships, the installation invites viewers beneath its imposing structure to consider how we are cradled within systems we cannot fully perceive, infrastructures of extraction and circulation that interpenetrate our bodies at scales both massive and molecular.
