CCS BARD

A stage, a feeling, an anchor, a political inclination: these are some of the manifold ways that the site and space of “the ground” can be read. It can found the organization of pictorial space, root the sensory experience of the body, or open up a terrain in which politics unfolds. As one half of the figure-ground distinction in the context of visual art, the ground is crucial to the construction of visual composition. More literally, it is the foundation on which sculpture resides. The sculptural works in Beyond the Mountain heighten our bodily senses by way of large volumes that force a careful navigation through space, while photographs and videos documenting performance works index various bodies and their relationships to the ground. A place on which the body can rest, become subsumed, or be activated politically, the ground is intrinsically non-universal: untethering rather than mooring–a shifting axis rather than a stable plane.