Drafting Universes, 2011

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

(one-week installation with four two-hour performances)

'Drafting Universes' is a process-based performance that also takes the form of an installation. With repeated gestures that represent creation, explosion, and removal, Schnadt scatters hundreds of tiny metal nuts over a seven-foot square metal floor grid. Referring to Carl Andre’s Zinc-Lead Plain (1969), Schnadt’s grid implies a field of measurement that when filled with metal “stars” approximates the experience both of looking at the night sky, and of attempting to quantify and fully know a phenomenon. Schnadt then photographs the “universes” she has created and presents them on an adjoining iPad. Through her simultaneously clinical, absurd, and evocative gestures, Schnadt considers the diligence, imagination, and hubris of the scientific process as it tries to define the infinite and unknown.

Slide show of accumulation of universes

Photos: Tricia Van Eck and Lara Rivera

using allyou.net