Map Quest
Over their 10-year partnership, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced a body of work that will always seem tender, ferocious, penetrating and witty.
Former Kansas City Art Institute students, Ericson and Ziegler patiently examined arcane stories of places and buildings, reviving what seemed to have been lost or destined for nothingness. Sadly, Ericson died of cancer in 1995, but here, MIT curator Bill Arning and Skidmore College curator Ian Berry show how their work lingers as a ballast to instability, securing meaning and significance through the artists’ public dialogue and their resurrection of fragile memories and unstable histories.
Ericson and Ziegler used mapping strategies — both literally and figuratively — to connect natural and cultural “landmarks.” The exhibition opens with 1988’s “America Starts Here,” a monumental installation containing broken windows from Philadelphia’s National Licorice Company factory. Those panes are sandwiched between other glass that the artists sandblasted with lines showing well-known trails, canals and rivers. Here, the panels are installed in their original factory configuration. The work radiates from its center to suggest the larger context of the city and surrounding areas. It’s named after Pennsylvania’s 1980s tourist slogan, conveying the multiple layers of controversy in such a presumptuous sentence.
Often, their public projects mined the beginnings and middles of places and things. In 1993, while Ericson and Ziegler were participating in an international exhibition in Arnhem, Netherlands, they replaced a restaurant’s place settings with gold-rimmed white dishes on which they had printed the names of products made by a large chemical company based in Arnhem. Like many of their works, this one is humorous and unnerving — you might be drinking your coffee out of a cup inscribed with something as seemingly innocuous as “Industrial Salt” or as discomforting as “Fatty Nitrates.” Rupturing the restaurant’s normal business in this quietly subversive way, they underlined multiple meanings of economic freedom and social responsibility. In private hands now, the place settings are housed in a 19th-century cabinet (“Dutch Cupboard”) and used by the owners from time to time.
Though much of their work was site-specific, Ericson and Ziegler also did object-based work, for which they turned to our material culture — plates, jars, old furniture. Many of these pieces feel nostalgic, rooted in place and time; pickle jars, houses, baby-food jars, dishes and soap conjure certain emotions. In 1992’s “The Smell and Taste of Things Remain,” the names of more than 400 pie recipes are inscribed on glass jars. Tucked in an antique pie cupboard, the jars are filled with a specially concocted scent that the artists commissioned, based on the smell of old books and records from the National Archives. Here again, they collapse together various histories — the recipes were culled from old cookbooks taken from different regions of the United States. Despite its uncomplicated aesthetic, the work drives down into itself while threading outward through social, cultural, civic and economic histories.
Their projects demonstrate an intense curiosity about how people and places fit together — or don’t — and how histories are both continuous and ruptured. Tracing systems and texts and relationships that course across geographic, cultural and social spaces, Ericson and Ziegler mapped out where and how we live.
