Hands, Nets, and Other Devices / Mãos, Redes e Outros Dispositivos, 2022

Adhesive vinyl on glass and walls

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Hand, Nets, and Other Devices was a solo exhibition at the jointly operated International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture and Abade Pedrosa Municipal Museum in Santo Tirso, Portugal.  The museum occupies a national heritage site, the repurposed 17th century Benedictine Monastery of Sao Bento founded in the 8th century and redesigned in 2015 by two Pritzker Prize winning Portuguese architects, Alvaro Siza Vieira and Eduardo Souto de Moura. My project explores visual and thematic territory at the intersection of art, archaeology, and architecture, responding to the objects in the museum’s permanent collection and the architecture of the building itself.  I have installed my adhesive vinyl on walls and windows throughout the museum as well as on seven oversize glass vitrines housing the museum’s permanent archaeological collection. Jeweled Net of the Vast Invisible, an immersive video visualization of the distribution of dark matter in the universe, occupies the large basement gallery.  Another gallery features a grid of vinyl images inspired by Portuguese azulejos tiles, an array of compositions from my anthropomorphic alphabet spelling a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “Cuncta fluunt, omnisque formatur imago.” “All things flow, and every image is a wandering form.” In a nearby gallery hangs the suite of twenty-six intaglio prints of my alphabet which are the basis for the vinyl tiles. A grid of ink paintings on mylar hangs in the reception area of the museum, a representative sample from the hundreds of hand painted studies that provided the source imagery for the vinyl. Animated grids, metamorphic characters from the vinyl installation, and glimpses of Jeweled Net infiltrate videos of regional archaeological sites running continuously on six monitors outside the permanent galleries.