[Francesca Herndon-Consagra is Senior Curator at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and curator of the current exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark.]

Tomorrow will be an informal conversation between me and Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.  It will be at 3:00 at Kemper 103 on the Washington University campus.  It is open and free to the public.  We will be discussing the conceptual practices inherent in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and Sharon Lockhart. The hour-long discussion will include light refreshments and be followed by a screening of Lockhart’s film Pine Flat (2006), which is a 16mm feature-length film in the small town of Pine Flat at the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. The project provides an intimate view of this small community’s youth.

During our discussion, Sabine and I might address how both artists  appear interested in the  “end” of social phenomena.  In 2008, Sharon photographed the workers at the Bath Iron Works in Maine at a time when so much manufacturing left our country.  Gordon Matta-Clark  in the 1970s became an urban archeologist of a city close to bankruptcy with many abandoned structures, and his projects captured the traces that everyday people left on the walls of these buildings.   We may also look at the way both artists intervene into and re-structure existing systems, like the city or the factory structure, and man’s assimilation/inhabitation of these structures.   In this context, we might touch upon the ideas of chaos and order found in both artists’ work or filmic structures: the unedited quality of Matta-Clark’s films versus the highly structured and systematic films of Lockhart.  Both offer the viewer the chance to look slowly and meditate on workers, actively cutting a building or walking down a hallway.  These are just a few points that we might address in our discussion, and we look forward to your comments too!