| The work, Tremors, a large-scale floor installation simulating cracked earth, is based on a photograph of a dried mud flat, splintered by desiccation cracks. The floor piece is made of MDF boards that were scraped and chiseled. One of my associations to this piece is Walter De Maria’s Earth Room (1977, New York) but, unlike De Maria, I sculpted the earth. Instead of actual soil, the “earth” I exhibit is made of an industrially produced wood product manufactured out of compressed sawdust. The material is intended to be used in the fabrication of cheap furniture, supposed to be covered with a coating of wood veneer or laminate. |  |
Gal Weinstein
The work, Tremors, a large-scale floor installation simulating cracked earth, is based on a photograph of a dried mud flat, splintered by desiccation cracks. The floor piece is made of MDF boards that were scraped and chiseled. One of my associations to this piece is Walter De Maria’s Earth Room (1977, New York) but, unlike De Maria, I sculpted the earth. Instead of actual soil, the “earth” I exhibit is made of an industrially produced wood product manufactured out of compressed sawdust. The material is intended to be used in the fabrication of cheap furniture, supposed to be covered with a coating of wood veneer or laminate. In this work I removed, rather than covered, the material’s surface. Indeed, I choose the material because I found that once it’s sanded, carved, or scraped, it resembles nothing more than parched earth.
I am interested in working through an ethical framework that affects a modernist “truth to material,” an approach that privileges and examines an exposed materiality, one that rejects painting and coating. Yet with this industrial material, the act of surface removal exposed a new surface that ended up resembling something entirely different, an organic and soft cracked earth. The audience was invited to walk on the piece; it was important to me that the viewer tangibly experience the fixed, unchanging nature of the surface. Their weight and tread did nothing to change the “earth” below their feet. I’m not sure what is more disorienting: sinking in mud or walking on a surface that is solid yet looks soft? The work created an unsettling contrast between what one perceives and what one senses.
This text is translated from Hebrew to English by Jessica Lockard.
