Archive Project 31: Katie Grinnan

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Katie Grinnan Home Page | Fall 2006 Archive

The Project Series
Project 31: Katie Grinnan

“Katie Grinnan: The Rise and Fall” includes five loosely related works of art: the book Rubble Division that focuses on Grinnan’s three-part project of the same name spanning 2005 through 2006; two videos—Rise and Fall and Rubble Division Interstate that document different components of Grinnan’s project; and two interconnected sculptures—Tower Story and Crane.

An interest in space has always been at the forefront of her work. Her sculptures involve the collision of physical, photographic, psychological, public, private, and political space. In her work, Grinnan collapses structure and surface, merging interior and exterior space into one material, where boundaries and parameters are defined yet fluid. Her sculptures evoke the effects of photography—often precariously balanced and fragile, her work seems to be frozen in a moment. By using photographs as sculptural material, Grinnan deconstructs and complicates representation to resonate beyond imagery into kinesthetic realms.

In the first stage of the Rubble Division project, Grinnan was commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum to create a float for the Fourth of July Parade. The float divided ruined and built space, partitioned the sounds of the band Cacophonous Sarcophagus, and manipulated the spectators’ experiences so that the perception of those on one side of the street would be different than those on the other. The second stage reversed the constructs of a typical parade, with the panels of the float fragmented and dispersed along the side of the road and the spectators moving through space in a 15-person van. The piece, aptly titled Inverse Parade, happened at the High Desert Test Site in 2006 and operated as a stop frame animation where the van served as a moving camera aperture for the audience—framing the panels and the sounds of the band The Meat Bees.

The third phase of the project, Rubble Division Interstate, was part of the exhibition “Interstate: The American Road Trip,” curated by Andrea Zittel of the High Desert Test Site and Allyson Baker and Robyn Donahue of Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. The panels from Inverse Parade were reconfigured into a road worthy, high velocity, nomadic sculpture that was broken down and reassembled daily. The Rubble Division, a seven-person army including Grinnan, two musicians (The Meat Bees), and several friends embarked on a journey across country beginning at Joshua Tree and ending at Socrates Sculpture Park.

Rubble Division emphasizes movement, transformation, renewal, and ruin. Consistent with this idea, the piece now exists in multiple forms and perspectives, proliferating its own mythology sculpturally, through video and through language. The artist book Rubble Division is an outgrowth of Grinnan’s body of work as a whole and compresses all the components of the project into one moment, acting as a photograph of the time period. The videos complement Grinnan’s project—Rise and Fall depicts the breaking down and building up process, while Rubble Division Interstate conveys the scope of the interstate journey itself. Tower Story and Crane represent examples of Grinnan’s earlier investigations into memory, perception, time, and space. These two sculptures were some of the first that Grinnan made that began to explore issues of breaking down and building up, and processes of destruction and reconstruction.

Katie Grinnan’s exhibition is the thirty-first in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator