Scott Hocking: New Mound City

Comments (0) By Jessica Baran Wednesday, Jun 30 2010

Featured Review: Scott Hocking: New Mound City Detroit-based Scott Hocking created two site-specific sculptures in abandoned north St. Louis industrial ruins for this Front Room exhibition. Large-scale photographs document both an enormous mound of discarded rubber gloves and a wide "stone" circle formed from broken concrete, transforming them into contemporary analogues to St. Louis' mound-building past. A copy of a 1906 map of the region's Mississippi shoreline that marks where mounds once existed hangs alongside a series of photos that depict the sites today: Parking lots, railroad tracks, the Lumière casino complex and highway overpasses now dominate the once-sacred spaces. In monumentalizing the abandoned corridors of industry, Hocking's new mound suggests that another native civilization is dying in our midst. To that end, the artist displays various artifacts from the installation sites — a stalactite, a rusted can of spray paint, a corroded clock, a box of iron-on nametags — labeling them with vague anthropological descriptions that place further distance between the contemporary moment and the labor-oriented past. Assembled during a recent weeklong residency, the exhibit re-presents a familiar landscape as something elegant, strange and uniquely fragile. Guest-curated by Cole Root. Through July 11 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Boulevard; 314-535-4660 or www.contemporarystl.org. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sun.