amelia voos

don’t look, don’t look enacts and embodies the entwining communal, generational, and familial remnants and echoes of my family’s rural farming community in Glen Gardner, NJ. I am crafting new iterations of land-based rituals through acts of present memory. The works center on place as the keeper and amplifier of that memory, and on my family, and the remnants of what was, as the entangled threads strung between space and time. the thesis, and these works, act as a collaboration between my grandparents and myself, and between nature and history; it is in this collaboration that the tendrils and connections between my grandparents’ and my own bodies, memories, and histories begin to emerge.

Laid to Rust (2021)

After studying the rusted and broken-down hand tools that have been tucked away in drawers and boxes since my grandfather stopped working the land, I took the only remnants of their functionality – the rust that built up on them for years – and used it to make prints of the tools that form laid to rust. The rust acts as a reminder and an echo of the acts in which these tools were once engaged. Making these prints serves as a reconnection with the labor worn into the surfaces of the tools, and as an enactment, my enactment, of that labor in a new form.

ritual bed (2021)

The alfalfa in ritual bed is a gesture, an attempt at reviving my family’s ritual of farming. My stand is smaller than my grandparents’ crops and was seeded and grown inside my home in nursery pots rather than in the open air. My methodology entwines the inauthentic and the authentic, and is rooted in the act of growing alfalfa. Memories and past actions re-emerge in the form of imprints on the material and environmental world around us, intersecting to form meaning through the enactment of ritual.

broadcast (2020)

Plants grow slowly, from seed to sprout, from flowering to drying out. In broadcast, the sun rises and sets, and the plants cycle with it, following the light. Then, those plants die, only to return next year. My grandfather, and his father, and his father’s father planted alfalfa. They tilled the soil, rotated the crops – generational memory repeated and reiterated over the decades. Across the gallery, different timescales are exhibited, and on the screen plays out the smallest timescale of alfalfa, seasonal growth and generational reenactment shown next to one another. The sprouts move, wending their way toward the sun, as nine days pass.

subdivision (2021)

The maps in subdivision, cut out of remnants of my grandfather’s barns, are a record of the change in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, over the past forty years. Originally steeped in crops and livestock, farmland has been disappearing from Hunterdon County for decades. From one hundred forty-nine acres to twelve, my grandparent’s farm has shrunk dramatically, slowly sold off in parcels until they lost most of the farmlands and pastures. The process of growth, and ultimately loss, that they started years ago is one that I am remembering and reiterating now.

hunterdon county (2021)

Time, memory, and truth are iterative. Communal memory, generational memory, and individual memory intermingle; hunterdon county is a reiteration of those memories, an endless copy. By using a mass-produced map as the basis of this piece, and incorporating my grandparents’ voices, their record of importance, and their memories, I transform the traditionally cartographic into something more fluid. The rituals and pathways of my grandparents’ thoughts are imposed on the map through notations, embroideries, and pathways, pointing to what was once present and what now has faded away.

amelia voos

don’t look, don’t look enacts and embodies the entwining communal, generational, and familial remnants and echoes of my family’s rural farming community in Glen Gardner, NJ. I am crafting new iterations of land-based rituals through acts of present memory. The works center on place as the keeper and amplifier of that memory, and on my family, and the remnants of what was, as the entangled threads strung between space and time. the thesis, and these works, act as a collaboration between my grandparents and myself, and between nature and history; it is in this collaboration that the tendrils and connections between my grandparents’ and my own bodies, memories, and histories begin to emerge.

Laid to Rust (2021)

After studying the rusted and broken-down hand tools that have been tucked away in drawers and boxes since my grandfather stopped working the land, I took the only remnants of their functionality – the rust that built up on them for years – and used it to make prints of the tools that form laid to rust. The rust acts as a reminder and an echo of the acts in which these tools were once engaged. Making these prints serves as a reconnection with the labor worn into the surfaces of the tools, and as an enactment, my enactment, of that labor in a new form.

ritual bed (2021)

The alfalfa in ritual bed is a gesture, an attempt at reviving my family’s ritual of farming. My stand is smaller than my grandparents’ crops and was seeded and grown inside my home in nursery pots rather than in the open air. My methodology entwines the inauthentic and the authentic, and is rooted in the act of growing alfalfa. Memories and past actions re-emerge in the form of imprints on the material and environmental world around us, intersecting to form meaning through the enactment of ritual.

broadcast (2020)

Plants grow slowly, from seed to sprout, from flowering to drying out. In broadcast, the sun rises and sets, and the plants cycle with it, following the light. Then, those plants die, only to return next year. My grandfather, and his father, and his father’s father planted alfalfa. They tilled the soil, rotated the crops – generational memory repeated and reiterated over the decades. Across the gallery, different timescales are exhibited, and on the screen plays out the smallest timescale of alfalfa, seasonal growth and generational reenactment shown next to one another. The sprouts move, wending their way toward the sun, as nine days pass.

subdivision (2021)

The maps in subdivision, cut out of remnants of my grandfather’s barns, are a record of the change in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, over the past forty years. Originally steeped in crops and livestock, farmland has been disappearing from Hunterdon County for decades. From one hundred forty-nine acres to twelve, my grandparent’s farm has shrunk dramatically, slowly sold off in parcels until they lost most of the farmlands and pastures. The process of growth, and ultimately loss, that they started years ago is one that I am remembering and reiterating now.

hunterdon county (2021)

Time, memory, and truth are iterative. Communal memory, generational memory, and individual memory intermingle; hunterdon county is a reiteration of those memories, an endless copy. By using a mass-produced map as the basis of this piece, and incorporating my grandparents’ voices, their record of importance, and their memories, I transform the traditionally cartographic into something more fluid. The rituals and pathways of my grandparents’ thoughts are imposed on the map through notations, embroideries, and pathways, pointing to what was once present and what now has faded away.