Daniel Arsham's art takes you back in time to the present from a far-flung future. The Brooklyn-based artist fossilises contemporary items - cameras, furniture, clothing, "things we associate with the present," says Arsham, 36, "as if they were crystallised over millennia."
Arsham's work - which spans sculpture, architecture and performance - plays with our sense of time and space. His obsession with archaeology goes back six years, to a trip to Easter Island.
"I was watching the archaeologists, thinking about how archaeology is composed," he says. He began to experiment with recasting modern technology in volcanic ash. "I've started to think of eBay as this bizarre Library of Alexandria," he says. When he studies its most popular lists, the site "suggests iconic objects".
To create the crystallised versions, Arsham casts a mould of the object; crushed calcite is then pressed into the moulds with a binding agent. "If I add wax to the mould in certain areas, it causes those parts to not bind, so I'm able to control the decay."
Arsham is almost completely colour-blind: much of his work is monochrome. But recently he has worn EnChroma corrective glasses, allowing him to experiment with a wider gamut: a purple cave of calcified basketballs and, for his HOURGLASS show, opening in February at Atlanta's High Museum, a Japanese Zen garden cast in deep blue. "It allowed me to select a palette and materials that I felt had a very strong resonance," he says.
Upcoming work includes a photo exhibit where 60,000 of his shots will be curated by a Cisco artificial intelligence, which detects the emotion in images. If you don't make it to his exhibitions, you may encounter his work in the distant future: the calcite sculptures don't decompose unless submerged in water, so "our work will outlast some of these original objects," he laughs. "In a funny way, they may be the last remnant."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
