Image: Installation view in MOCA GA Edcuation/Resource Center

A site-specific reinstallation on the Education/Resource Center Project Ramp

Exhibition Dates: July 17 - September 18, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, July 16, 6:30-8:30pm

BEACH by Linda Armstrong

Situated in an open space

stripped markers lead you inland from the shore.

Slick slices of sea foam

surround you.

I have spent over 30 years exploring and discovering new places and spaces at Cumberland Island, a remote natural, unspoiled wilderness area off the coast of Georgia. It was on one of these exploration trips in the early nineties, just after dawn on a late spring morning on the island, that I made a discovery that would make a profound change in my art and me. I had just come back from a trip lasting several months in southeast Asia and was relishing a quiet solo beach experience.  As I walked the beach, I came upon a dead dolphin that had washed ashore during the night. Later that day, I met with Carol Ruckdeschel, the Cumberland Island Museum resident naturalist, and she had brought the dolphin into her lab to ascertain the cause of death. She showed me that the dolphin had lesions in its mouth, indicating an immune deficiency like disease. It was the first example that she had seen on the island. Man made pollution the likely source. This experience urged me to begin an examination of the questions I previously asked in the context of art making. Suddenly pure formalism seemed irrelevant.

Since this time the primary subject of my work has been the continuing investigation of the places in which I experience man's cultural impact over time layered with the reality of environmental beauty and the subsequent degradation. I am involved with the multi-layered aspects affecting the natural environment juxtaposed with the activity of collecting specimens. Using sculptural and photographic elements, I construct a simulacrum of endangered spaces.

When MOCA GA asked me to reinstall ‘Beach’ this July I immediately thought of Carol’s saying that the birds and mammals she found on the beach always had a thin coating of oil. The parallels between the current Gulf disaster and my earlier experiences are now converging.

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