Pennsylvania Man
As photographs are perceived to freeze a moment in time, Pennsylvania Man, a multi-version project in collaboration with ceramist Tomás Wolff, intended to directly correlate documentation with imagination. The idea was to both bend the perception of time and matter in the act of ‘discovering’ an entombment of a dreamer with his dream. This act of archaeology of an imagination, was realized by the evidence of artifact. A Herculaneum moment, if you will, revealed by uncovering the dreamer and the dream, intact. From a material perspective the act of light striking and ‘impressing’ its heat upon film seemed to correlate with the act of forming an image with clay fixed through heat.
Pennsylvania Man was first ‘performed’ as an archeological find, with *photo-documentation of the excavation, outdoors, step by step. The next version of the program involved recreating the ‘dig’ indoors, akin to a natural science museum diorama. Its third iteration, Homomutonous mnemonicus, was an illumination incorporating installation of artifacts and images that enhanced the imaginary aspects of the original, to realize a dream of entanglement that the found figure was presumed to project into real space from his ‘bed’ before being catalyzed and entombed. These photographs document the collaborations body of work produced between 1983-1985.
At right: detail from Pennsylvania Man installation:cast ceramic, iron wash, soil and stone.
Please scroll down for views of original excavation, and first indoor installation
Finding Pennsylvania Man, Macungie, Pennsylvania, 1983
