A Wet Chemical Trace
A Wet Chemical Trace
through October 21, at Helena Anrather
28 Elizabeth St, New York
ITP Alumna Miriam Simun's first solo show in New York, A WET CHEMICAL TRACE is the result of three years of research on the ecological, political and chemical significance of the Agalinis acuta, New York's only federally protected endangered plant, a tiny parasitic flower the blooms one day a year.
The confluence of desires of a commissioning museum (MAD), an artist and a global flavors corporation (IFF) in 2014 led to the capture of the scent of the Agalinis - collected as molecules, analyzed in a lab into digital data, and synthetically reproduced as the scent Our Day Will Come. This scent, pushed by water vapor traveling through silicone tubing, now enables the growth of little bluestem grass - the very roots the Agalinis attaches to in the wild. The series of sculptures, lab-setups, life extenders, Corporeal Downloads, invert this parasitic relationship and continues the existence of this being, downloaded from data and spread, now wet, through the gallery space and into the visitors' bodies...
A constellation of other bodies make up the sculptures, grow lights dipped in silicone, humidifiers with silicone skin, black lights to make visible the vapor, glass shapes to distill and re-hydrate the scented vapor in various ways, laboratory clamps, magnets, electric cord.
The steel armatures that hold up this emergent nature, emotional laboratory, tribute to molecular upload... were all bent cold, a physical exercise, an imprint of my body on the steel, as the steel left imprints on me..then other bodies come into the picture, the assemblage enacting precisely because of the tension of each element vying with and against each other.
"The image of affective bodies forming assemblages will enable me to highlight...a theory of action and responsibility that crosses the human-nonhuman divide." - Jane Bennett, The Agency of Assemblage
The video imagines the perspective of this scent, the Agalinis' chemical marker, now wrestled from endangered flesh, existentially intertwined with new interests but also imbued with new abilities, and now mobile, entering new spaces and bodies.