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"Ghost"is an eighteen foot long twin of structural
beams which hold up the ceiling of SmackMellon Gallery, 19th
century spice factory under the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
It is made of semi-translucent starched cloth, and small metal
rivets. The beam is held aloft by two eight foot wheels which
appear to be caught in the act of rolling it away from its
origins up above. Yet that suggested motion is held in arrest
by delicate white organza ribbons tethered to the beams up
above. The girder creates a ghost image of what is above,
rendering in the intimate materials of dressmaking, and specifically
nurse's uniforms and the like, an industrial 19th
century architecture. This spectral twin is meant to conjure
the idea that the architecture has shed its own skin, and
undergone transformation from its past to its present - as
a metaphor for the more intimate changes of the body.
Ellen Driscoll 2003
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