Shuyi Cao
Of Shape Offshore
Of Shape Offshore traces a constellation of spatiotemporal events as ‘offshore’: One that transcends specific localities and temporalities, activates the elusive and indefinable boundary, a marginal world that is continuously shaped by the relentless movement of past and present. The sculptures are created with material residues collected from the Brooklyn Dead Horse Bay – an abandoned beach, a historically designated location for processing dead animals and urban waste and a former landfill. For decades, animal remains and detritus of objects buried half a century ago have been reappearing at the shoreline of Dead Horse Bay as part of the exposure of landfill due to climate change, storm erosion, and rising sea levels. The area was closed in 2020 as radioactive matter was detected among human artifacts.
With sculptures that fossilize the present, the reconstructed archipelago of decaying remnants symbolizes the sedimented debris layers of our vast compressed contemporary lives and deaths. The installation also includes a video work when exhibited (proposed for license) that unravels a speculative cosmology meditating on the earth’s history, geo-trauma, and queer pluralism of our ancestry. Spiraling downward the morphing evolutionary time, the dreamlike voyage leads to the pre-human, pre-mammalian worlds while alluding to deep historical futures.
Shuyi Cao is a New York-based artist and researcher whose practice explores alchemical approaches to material, matter and knowledge osmosis. Through archeological speculation and ecological fiction, she contemplates the porous plurality of relations between sciences, technocultures, mythologies, and cosmologies. Her multi-medium sculpture and installation traverse enormous and microscopic scales, involving more/less/other-than-human worlds. Her making methods synthesize dynamic spatiotemporal configuration and material transformation, from ceramic and glass making with wild clay, sand, mineral, and earth elements to digital fabrication such as 3D printing and virtual environment simulation. Her recent works center on world-making that unravels monstrous intimacy and queer kinship across a myriad of networked life forms and incompatible scales. Combining hand-crafted objects, technological artifacts, and moving images, she creates paradoxical fossils - tangible and intangible - as portals to meditate geotrauma, trans-corporeality and prehistoric futurity.