Client: The Contemporary Austin
Location: Austin, TX, United States
Completion date: 2021
Project Team
The Contemporary Austin
Artist
Overview
Featured at The Contemporary Austin’s 2021 Art Dinner, this installation titled “grounding, you” was presented in it deconstructed state – a gesture of the ways in which we are connected when apart.
ABOUT grounding, you
Susan Scafati is an American conceptual artist who explores how individual versus collective identities and personal versus cultural mythologies are constructed. Her installation refers to the ritual of touching nature to ground oneself. Comprised of spider wood root, this installation centers around the symbolic association of spiders with interconnection and illusion. Organic and artificial matter collaged together question interventions between our natural and built environments.
Scafati plays with changing light refractions as a metaphor for cultural lag, a term coined by William Fielding Ogburn describing the lag between material — the technology, the infrastructure, the physical things— and immaterial culture — the rituals, the rules, the institutions.”
Mixed media
60 x 12 x 72 inches
Executed in 2021
Goals
Commissioned to create a custom large-scale installation for The Contemporary Austin's 2021 Art Dinner which was presented in its deconstructed state across the space.