SLOW MOTION Exhibit Enters Final Weeks At Grounds For Sculpture

Slow Motion, an exhibition at Grounds For Sculpture,  is entering its final weeks and will close on September 1, 2025. The exhibition, which is currently on view in and around the sculpture park's Domestic Arts Building, expands the boundaries of contemporary sculpture using unconventional materials and processes. Founded in 2012, Monument Lab is a nonprofit public art and history studio based in Philadelphia, which cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments. Traditional approaches to monument-making emphasize durability, solidity, and myths of enduring permanence; however, Slow Motion embraces the pleasures and possibilities of material transience.

“At GFS, we believe that exhibitions can become a catalyst for transformation across the organization, while reflecting our commitment to present the works of contemporary sculptors who reflect the greater world, challenge perceptions, and inspire,” said Gary Garrido Schneider, Executive Director of Grounds For Sculpture. “Collaborating with a guest curator and project partner such as Monument Lab has allowed us to infuse new perspectives and has supported innovative approaches to curating, while presenting new voices and ideas.”

Slow Motion was organized by Monument Lab, with five artists selected to participate and respond to the exhibition's central question, “how do we remake our relationship with monuments?” The artists were chosen based on several key criteria: use of unconventional materials; ability to embrace playfulness in their creative practice; and the incorporation of accessibility, inclusivity, and equity lenses in their work. The featured artists are Billy Dufala, Ana Teresa Fernández, Colette Fu, Omar Tate, and Sandy Williams IV. Each artist's work underscores how materials are not just a medium for monumental work; materials carry meanings themselves, functioning as symbols of specific places, memories, scents, and feelings.

“It's been a pleasure to work with and learn from these five artists, whose interdisciplinary practices have long experimented with the materialities and temporalities of public memory. Their boundary-pushing artworks for this exhibition have inspired visitors to re-orient themselves in how they relate to monuments, to collective memories, and ultimately, to each other,” shared Patricia Eunji Kim, Monument Lab's Curator of Slow Motion.

Billy Dufala is an interdisciplinary artist in Philadelphia and co-founder of Recycled Artists in Residence (RAIR). Dufala's practice offers a playful and critical approach to the twin problems of material waste and exploitative land use. Future Futures, a site-specific sculpture made of recycled aluminum bales, is a temporary monument that functions as both a material commodity and a staged “performance.” Following the closing of the exhibition, the sculpture will be dismantled and these materials will be reintroduced into the commodities market, with proceeds used to fund future artistic projects.

Ana Teresa Fernández is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Mexico, now based in San Francisco, whose work focuses on borderlands, and often, the border between land and sea. SHHH, a 7-foot-high series of letters, is covered in 1,800 suspended golden acrylic mirrors which both react to and reflect back their surrounding environment. The work is a monument to the silence of cultures and habitats as sea levels rise and coastlines disappear, a future memorial to what will inevitably be lost.  

Colette Fu is an artist and a paper engineer born in New Jersey and based in Philadelphia, best known for the creation of pop-up books. For this exhibition, Fu created Noodle Mountain, a large-scale pop-up book that illuminates the long history of noodles, a complex culinary connection to experiences of immigration, labor, and collective identity formations in the Chinese diaspora. In her work, Fu has long considered the material life cycles of archives and experimented with the materialization of stories and memories through non-conventional practices.

Omar Tate, who is well-known for his culinary creations, identifies as an artist who uses food as one of his many mediums. His work is rooted in the values of nourishment and the reclamation of Black food traditions and cultural aesthetics that can be experienced through his Philadelphia-based restaurant, Honeysuckle, which Tate co-owns and operates alongside his wife Cybille St. Aude-Tate. For Slow Motion, Tate created a living sculpture, Blue, based on the hoodoo traditions that use “haint blue” as a protective motif. Blue features a bottle tree placed amongst living plants that have either a culinary or medicinal purpose. Tate also worked within the culinary spaces of Grounds For Sculpture to design a three-part dinner series that speaks to the way that smells, taste, and sight can be poetic entry points to share memories.

Sandy Williams IV is a multidisciplinary artist who created new work for this exhibition connected to their Wax Monuments series. In this project, recognizable public monuments that are made in traditional and durable materials are recast as wax miniatures and positioned on a stage inspired by the steps from the Lincoln Memorial. These monuments, which normally convey a sense of permanence and immutability, have been periodically melted throughout the exhibition. This iteration of Williams' work offers an approach to public memory that “hold[s] space for disenfranchised public memories and visualiz[es] frameworks of emancipation and shared agency.”

As visitors experience the exhibition, they are invited to slow down and re-examine how they might remake their relationships with public monuments. An engagement space within the exhibition explores key themes addressed in this project, offering opportunities for active participation and reflection.

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