Spectral Compositions of Shade Light in the Smoky Mountains, NC 1997-1955
An immersive sculpture comprised of translucent silk organza printed with photographs taken at the artist’s rural family home in Cold Mountain, North Carolina, a site less than an hour from Black Mountain College. The streaming light from the exterior windows both illuminates and diffuses the printed images, dissolving the details into layered abstraction and evoking the idea of memorial through color and material. As viewers pass through the hanging fabric panels, field recordings of katydids (bush crickets) reverberate from an unseen speaker, creating a sensory experience that, as Muszynski describes, evokes the “ephemeral and eternal aspects of nature” as a space of “refuge for personal invention and creative community.”
The site specific sculpture consists of three panels of translucent, natural fiber silk organza. Each panel is printed with a photograph. They hang from the ceiling on tracks and can slide into different configurations: from side by side as documentary style photographs to overlapped which dissolves the details into abstract color and material.
The images are 30”w x 86”l the same size as most home doorways and the inside of a burial vault. The UV print ink is solvent and VOC free, and Greenguard Gold certified.
I took each photo and made the field recordings in the summers of 2016 and 2017 on my family’s land while working alongside a family friend to prepare the land for sale by clearing trails and repairing the spring box, a repurposed burial vault.
