The Way We Were
black point reinterpretive site
Berkeley Art Center
Ongoing – March 29
Have you hiked the Black Point Trail in Mount Diablo State Park? The landscape appears timeless. Yet, the Bay Area has been in European hands for 250 years. We know that Europeans have a special fondness for “cultivating” nature – leaving their mark.
Black Point Trail
What was the area like before the European incursion?
black point reinterpretive site attempts to answer that question. The exhibition is an immersive, site-responsive installation constructed by multidisciplinary artists Torreya Cummings and Sarah Lowe.
The display approaches the reenvisioning of the area by using the format of a 19th-century Victorian “period room” Period rooms function as domestic interior spaces to present a wealthy family’s opulent, and often exotic, treasures.
Cummings & Lowe have fashioned theatrical backdrops, handcrafted facsimiles, props, furniture and created a stage. The work plays out the political dramas of natural history, colonialism and mechanical interventions into the Northern California landscape from the time of Western expansion to the present day.
The fabricated scenes challenge and question how art and artifice, photography and commercialism have functioned as tools of both history-making and historical erasure. black point reinterpretive site explores the changes in landscape, in natural species evolution (or extinction) and in the proliferation of industry and development of the Bay Area. As a telescopic view of the near-distant past, it focuses you on the potential warning signs for the future.
The massive installation spans the entire gallery and includes sculpture, photography, textiles, soundscapes and a live fountain. The heightened artificiality of a theatrical stage destabilizes the presumed authority of the museum. Cummings & Lowe invite us into this figurative hall of mirrors to better understand where we stand today and how quickly the tides can turn for all of us.
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