City Deposits, 2005
Part of Urban/Rural/Wild, an exhibition curated by Sarah Kanouse and Nicholas Brown for Ispace gallery in Chicago
Limestone quarries inside Chicago's city limits produced building materials from 400 million-year-old Silurian era dolomite from the late 1800s though the first half of the 20th century. The quarries ranged from 125 to 380 feet deep, and almost all were eventually filled to the brim with garbage, and then transformed into public parks — except for one quarry that was opened in the middle of a debtors' prison, and later incorporated into the grounds of Cook County jail.
For the exhibition: A glassed-in air shaft in the center of I-Space Gallery provided a surrogate hole which was wrapped with clear vinyl text. A guidebook provided historical information and directions for visiting the quarry sites, and two paired videos with crawling text listed all the items wanted and offered over the course of the summer on Chicago's free-cycle list serve, a free materials exchange service that keeps unwanted stuff out of city dumps. The "Log of Boring" of the former Stearns Quarry, closed as a dump in 1996, and in the process of becoming an elaborately terraformed public park in 2005, revealed layers of materials in a core sample of the site, where we led a walking tour with the site manager and a geologist.