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For the Black and White Project Space, De St. Croix builds a massive new site-specific work, Mountain Strip. A monumental miniaturized landscape section of a West Virginia coal mine, --a mountain strip mine, simulating a devastating slice of the environment. As the nation and the world grapple with the ecological, social and political implications of such activities, these mines have taken on more iconic meaning and unintended scrutiny.
De St Croix, quite literally builds a mountain upside down referring to the strip mining process of mountain top removal and filling of the valleys, definitively flatting the land and stripping it of all its resources and sustainability,
The installation runs over forty feet in length and towers above the exterior walls as it climbs up twenty-two feet high and dynamically cuts through the exterior exhibition space spilling into the interior gallery functioning as a barrier for the viewer. The mountain ridge is not only presented upside down, but also architecturally the space is used to wedge the mountain between the project’s exhibition walls and precariously suspends it inches from the floor. The installation exists as a three-dimensional still there for us to observe as a subliminal image. Referencing the historical genre of the landscape, Mountain Strip is a painstaking interpretive rendering of the mountain’s topography and its demise. In addition, numerous detailed ink drawings in support of the project and its research will be on view.
Mountain Strip is based on recent travels to strip mines and its communities in West Virginia. The research for the project involved travel to abandoned and active strip mines, interviews with anti strip mining activists, regional green organizations, the child services department in the area, working miners as well as local residents. Extensive documentation was done through both on the ground activities and an aerial fly over of the strip mines.
The research trip converged on the top of Kayford Mountain, an extremely heavily mined area, where De St. Croix interviewed Larry Gibson over several days. Larry’s last stand against the strip mining companies has won him a recent CNN hero's award. His mountaintop has been in his family for over 200 years and is being stripped away leaving a small green patch topping the mountain in an otherwise barren and leveled landscape. He has fought this type of land devastation for 20 years. The Mountain Strip project specifically reconstructs a selected section of the Kayford Mountain Ridge top in West Virginia as both a monument and memorial to the land.
blane de st croix
mountain strip
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Photos by Etienne Frossard
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Photos by Etienne Frossard
For the Black and White Project Space, De St. Croix builds a massive new site-specific work, Mountain Strip. A monumental miniaturized landscape section of a West Virginia coal mine, --a mountain strip mine, simulating a devastating slice of the environment. As the nation and the world grapple with the ecological, social and political implications of such activities, these mines have taken on more iconic meaning and unintended scrutiny.
De St Croix, quite literally builds a mountain upside down referring to the strip mining process of mountain top removal and filling of the valleys, definitively flatting the land and stripping it of all its resources and sustainability,
The installation runs over forty feet in length and towers above the exterior walls as it climbs up twenty-two feet high and dynamically cuts through the exterior exhibition space spilling into the interior gallery functioning as a barrier for the viewer. The mountain ridge is not only presented upside down, but also architecturally the space is used to wedge the mountain between the project’s exhibition walls and precariously suspends it inches from the floor. The installation exists as a three-dimensional still there for us to observe as a subliminal image. Referencing the historical genre of the landscape, Mountain Strip is a painstaking interpretive rendering of the mountain’s topography and its demise. In addition, numerous detailed ink drawings in support of the project and its research will be on view.
Mountain Strip is based on recent travels to strip mines and its communities in West Virginia. The research for the project involved travel to abandoned and active strip mines, interviews with anti strip mining activists, regional green organizations, the child services department in the area, working miners as well as local residents. Extensive documentation was done through both on the ground activities and an aerial fly over of the strip mines.
The research trip converged on the top of Kayford Mountain, an extremely heavily mined area, where De St. Croix interviewed Larry Gibson over several days. Larry’s last stand against the strip mining companies has won him a recent CNN hero's award. His mountaintop has been in his family for over 200 years and is being stripped away leaving a small green patch topping the mountain in an otherwise barren and leveled landscape. He has fought this type of land devastation for 20 years. The Mountain Strip project specifically reconstructs a selected section of the Kayford Mountain Ridge top in West Virginia as both a monument and memorial to the land.