Portals at Kreeger Museum

Portals (2017)

Installation of a work rooted in mirror-based, totemic sculpture, this time, with mirrors wrapped in rusted wireframes and natural vines, installed at the sculpture garden of the Kreeger Museum Contemporary Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. For this earlier work, Muss built seven steel-mirrored columns, six upright as trees and one lying down. Each steel column is wrapped with rusted wire resembling vines. The mirrors inside the wire reflect the surrounding woods and create a parallel natural world inside each sculpture, questioning the notion of human perception, reality, and nature itself. Also, as in all of her work, there is a strong reflection on the passage of time and the human legacy. Through her installation, we can develop a strong and intimate bond with the surrounding trees and foliage, and at the same time with ourselves, revealing both the beauty and richness of the natural world as the background for our lives, while also projecting ourselves into the human-caused devastation of nature, resources, and life. This large-scale staged installation explores humankind’s potential to perceive the natural world at two different scales, one vast (nature) and one small (human scale), thereby opening the possibilities to reflect on the eternal, the vulnerable, and the multiple dimensions of observable universes that coexist. In times when forests are burning in the Amazon and Africa, these works speak loudly to the importance of re-thinking the perspective of our human-made objects as being something that can affect, modify and shift our perception of things beyond our immediate reality.