85 Union Street, mixed-media installation, 2004
project
For the 1:100 exhibition, Corin Hewitt uses the dirt swept from a local street corner to cast his sculpture of a discarded plastic trash bag. Embedded in the dirt and resin are discarded materials and refuse, turning the idea of the receptacle inside out.
artist's statement
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
Lewis Carroll
I use personal history to explore the relationship between private and public memory. I am interested in the ways in which we, as individuals, create monuments for ourselves out of culturally shared experience. For this reason, my work incorporates historical and cultural icons (Skylab, weatherman Willard Scott) that are recognizable and familiar. These icons, however, are put to a very personal and specific use.
In my previous two projects, I incorporated subjects that loom large in my memory as well as our shared cultural history. The two-part project, Here’s What’s Happening in Your Part of the World (As We Speak), 2001-3, featured a larger-than-life cast marble sculpture of weatherman Willard Scott. Scott’s forecasts defined the daily environment throughout my childhood. In the urban version of the work, the sculpture was located in a 30-foot shaft way of a 19th-century townhouse in Manhattan. The sculpture was then moved to a silo in Vermont where it was on view to the public for a period of a year.
For my most recent project, 85 Union Street, I joined three different environments. The exterior of the piece is a cast earth 1/12-scale model of Skylab, the first US manned space station, which plummeted back to earth in 1979. I remember watching the uncontrolled fall of Skylab in my grandmother’s house. The interior is a 1/12 scale-replica of the rooms my grandmother lived in her entire life. The work is exhibited crashed into a forest floor.
The outer layer of the piece is made of earth taken from underneath my childhood home in Vermont. The interior rooms, visible through a long crack in the cast dirt exterior, include exact reproductions of the furnishings and clutter in the house precisely as my grandmother left them on the day she died.