Painting
Geist: Ghost, Mind, Spirit/Premonitions
- Description
- Framed acrylic on canvas painting titled Geist: Ghost, Mind, Spirit/Premonitions from a series titled The Geist Series, 1999–2001, by Jourdan Arpelle. The painting is primarily gray with a darker gray outline of a square and an outline of a white square. Two white lines transverse the canvas through the squares. Paired with the painting is a framed sculptural piece consisting of a hand-blown hourglass, filled with World Trade Center dust.
- Historical Notes
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In 1999, artist Jourdan Arpelle began working on a series of paintings she titled The Geist Series. The body of work consisted of square canvases painted in shades of gray, burnished to mirror the texture of silk. Overlaid onto them were patterns of fine lines arrayed as open squares, sometimes overlapping one another. Arpelle considered this project an abstract exploration of the dematerialization process, from matter into spirit.
In the aftermath of witnessing 9/11 firsthand, Arpelle perceived the earlier series as premonitions of the World Trade Center’s destruction, in which the outlined footprints of the vanished towers emerged and receded from the flat gray planes of the canvas.
Curator's Comment
In 2001, downtown resident Jourdan Arpelle was transitioning from a career as an art consultant and gallerist back to her original vocation as a visual artist. Arpelle’s studio was located in the loft home she shared with her husband, Henry Ziegler, at 55 Liberty Street, near the World Trade Center, where he worked. On the morning of September 11, both Arpelle and her husband were at home when the terrorist attacks began. They evacuated their building after both towers lay in ruins. Several weeks passed before they were permitted to retrieve personal belongings from their apartment, its interiors soiled by dust and grit blown in from the World Trade Center.
It was during an initial visit back to Liberty Street that Arpelle noticed a blanket of thick gray ash accumulated on the roof of a bank building visible from her apartment window. The sight compelled her to seek permission from bank officials to collect some of the dust. She conceived the idea of re-purposing it into an art project that would complement work she recently completed titled The Geist Series.
Desiring to pair the paintings with a metaphor specific to her post-September 11 sorrow, Arpelle drew on the form of an hourglass, evoking time’s passage and the inexorable ebbing of life. Following Arpelle’s design, each sculptural hourglass was hand-blown by Deborah Czeresko at Urban Glass in Brooklyn. Ghostly dust salvaged from lower Manhattan was then sealed into one tear-shaped bulb of each vessel. These were inset into their receiving frame and secured with a hand-wrought steel waist clamp. The result is an intimate reliquary and memorial reference to everything obliterated on 9/11 and to all who were lost, reduced to their mortal human essence as dust.
It was during an initial visit back to Liberty Street that Arpelle noticed a blanket of thick gray ash accumulated on the roof of a bank building visible from her apartment window. The sight compelled her to seek permission from bank officials to collect some of the dust. She conceived the idea of re-purposing it into an art project that would complement work she recently completed titled The Geist Series.
Desiring to pair the paintings with a metaphor specific to her post-September 11 sorrow, Arpelle drew on the form of an hourglass, evoking time’s passage and the inexorable ebbing of life. Following Arpelle’s design, each sculptural hourglass was hand-blown by Deborah Czeresko at Urban Glass in Brooklyn. Ghostly dust salvaged from lower Manhattan was then sealed into one tear-shaped bulb of each vessel. These were inset into their receiving frame and secured with a hand-wrought steel waist clamp. The result is an intimate reliquary and memorial reference to everything obliterated on 9/11 and to all who were lost, reduced to their mortal human essence as dust.
- Accession Number: C.2016.116.1
- Dimensions: 12.875 in X 12.875 in
- Dimensions (Metric): 32.7025 cm X 32.7025 cm
- Source: Friedericke Biggs
- Credit Line: Gift of Jeremy H. Biggs
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