Walking into the
Linfield Gallery, where Crystal Schenk’s Artifacts
of Memory is installed, is a disorienting experience. It is difficult to
make sense of what you are seeing. At first, the eye is drawn across the
gallery by two horizontal lines of pod-like structures—the top row hung from
the ceiling and the bottom row suspended above the floor with near-invisible
wire. As you let your eyes adjust, you realize that what appeared to be a two-dimensional
line of pods is in fact a three-dimensional haze that fills the gallery.
Schenk, an
American sculptor and installation artist, lost her mother to suicide in 2004.
She made Artifacts to represent the
overwhelming grief she experienced in the wake of her mother’s death. For an
artist, there is perhaps no greater challenge than to embody an emotion, to
give voice to the ineffable, to bring form to the formless. With Artifacts, Schenk accomplishes this in a
number of ways.
In the
beginning, grief is sharp, savage, violent. The pods start red at the center, like
a wound, and are tightly arranged, unnavigable. If you follow them outward toward
the edges of the installation, they become sporadic, fading to pinkish orange
and then to white, drained of their lifeblood. Anyone who has experienced a
profound loss knows that grief is not linear, that it can feel more like a
cloud of heartbreak through which you can move in any direction, backward or
forward, up or down, often not knowing where you are headed or where you have
been.
