Melted Away - Temporary Monuments
The ice sculpture’s straightforward display conceals a rare capacity to elicit complex reactions and intense emotions demonstrating sculpture’s power to engage our bodily awareness …
– Robert Atkins
Nothing beside remains - Ozymandias, 1818, Percy Shelley
We call these sculptures temporary monuments. The monuments of Melted Away are ideal markers for the opening decades in the 21st century – first, DEMOCRACY is broken, then, the ECONOMY ruined; the MIDDLE CLASS disappears, THE FUTURE is tenuous, THE AMERICAN DREAM vanishes, and TRUTH remains an open question.
The familiarity and materiality of ice create an accessible space. People approach the sculptures. They touch them in the urge to sense the bodily shift from solid to liquid; as if the sculpture itself were succumbing to a fever’s heat. They know that the strong, beautiful, physical presence they witness is elusive and fragile. Within hours, the sculptures totally disappear.
Melted Away is a body of work comprised from still and moving images captured as the sculptures disintegrate into broken words and shards of letters.
…LigoranoReese’s sculptures… start out as massive objects, weighing two tons, but by the end of the day they are no more than memories. The sculptures are constantly metamorphosing, changing shape at every moment… the pace picks up near the end as chunks drop off and gaping holes appear in them, creating poetic word plays with the remaining letters and parts of letters.
– Charles Bernstein, The American Dream Project
Melted Away - Temporary Monuments 2008-2016
