Keith Edmier

Keith Edmier

 

In his proposal for Penn Station Ciborium, Keith Edmier writes that he was immediately drawn to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni's rotunda: "It reconnected me with my first visit to Rome in the 1980s, and in particular, the impression that the Pantheon left on me. I became interested in taking on the form of the ruin and interconnecting such a form to both Rome and New York-filtered through my personal experience of living in Manhattan and previous concerns in my work".

Those concerns often include conflating personal experiences with public personas, the private and the public, sexuality in humans and in the natural world, and geographically and historically distant and distinct events. Like some amateur forensic researcher, Edmier finds uncanny correspondences in these realms, which he draws together to form bodies of work that contain traces of past, present, and future trajectories.

In Edmier's hands, a ciborium, the canopy-like structure built over a church altar, is both an entrance portal and a personal reliquary. His structure, which mirrors the rotunda of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, pulls together references from two destroyed stations: Rome's original Stazione Termini, built upon the ancient Roman bath complex of the Thermae Diocletiani and demolished in 1937, and Pennsylvania Station, New York's architectural masterpiece by McKim, Mead, and White inspired by the Roman baths of Caracalla, completed in 1910, and razed in 1963. For ornamentation, Edmier has drawn from the famous vaulted tile ceilings of Rafael Guastavino in the Oyster Bar at New York's Grand Central Terminal. The very name conjures hot clam chowder, crisp gin martinis, and happy commuters held within its caverned bosom.

The steel support columns and trusses are based on those found in the concourse of the original Penn Station. They support a Guastavino dome, containing an oculus (similar to that found in the Pantheon) directly aligned with the oculus of the rotunda above. Nestled like a matryoshka doll within the Palazzo's entrance, the inside of Edmier's dome is lined with glazed white tiles in a herringbone pattern, stained with an aqua or verdigris-like patina-as if the structure might have been exposed to seawater. At the base of the columns are clusters of cast-resin and marble-dust oysters. Each column represents a different stage of the oyster's life cycle-closed shells, open with mature oysters, open (but empty), open with juvenile oysters. Oysters contain both female and male reproductive organs, and in scientific experiments have been induced to self-fertilize-a topic of Edmier's previous investigations. Once plentiful in New York, oysters largely died out in the polluted waters of the twentieth century, and thus represent for Edmier an emblem of decline. In keeping with many of Edmier's previous works, a certain pathos prevails in his depiction of life's once-fecund possibilities as only brief moments in the journey toward destruction and ruin.

Below visitors' feet Edmier has buried a reliquary of sorts, a box containing an X-shaped piece of steel railing from the original Penn Station, resting in a bed of soil from the New Jersey Meadowlands site where most of the remains of the building were unceremoniously dumped. Also imbedded in the soil are a number of fragments of the artist's past work-remains excavated from his 36th Street studio. He adds his own fragments to the stones of Rome.

 

Tom Eccles