Reconstructions 1995

Description

Kulicka crushed grass and clover with a meat grinder, and extracted chlorophyll. In one room, she scraped the floors by hand and rubbed the chlorophyll into the bare wood, temporarily giving it scent and green color.

On another floor, a refrigerated plexiglass tank is filled with a mixture of chlorophyll, water and alcohol, and plastic tubing carries the liquid through the walls into an adjacent room. These tubes lead to floorboards – parts of the room which are made of wood. Kulicka examines the results of human conquest over the land.

Artist Statement

Reconstructions is a continuing series of installations/attempts to bring long-gone life back into wood, to bring wood back into a tree.

The Reconstructions at 1414 Monterey consist of two complementing projects. On the third floor, a series of transparent tubing runs form the large tank containing over ninety gallons of chlorophyll. It distributes the liquid into the exposed wood of the window frames, floor, and wall studs. This system is mechanical and engineered, a reminder of industrial civilization.

On the second floor, the chlorophyll is being rubbed into the wooden elements of the architecture with the artist’s bare hands—a process that is performed over the weeks, personal and emotional, inspired by spirituality and magic of ancient healers and shamans. 

I try to counterbalance the high logic, rationality and effectiveness of technologies around me with irrational, futile gestures—seemingly naïve, foolish acts—and with the emotional and intuitive, sometimes desperate or inadequate. 

In Reconstructions I build my own machine to give an old wooden building a (green) blood transfusion; I gently rub fresh chlorophyll into old planks of the floor. It’s a mockery of technology, it’s a mockery of good intentions. My aim is to stir our hidden appreciation of absurd, to startle minds set by the logic of cause and effect.