In the Ephemeral Spirit: "Ghost" at The Luminary

Printmaker Sage Dawson curates a magical one-day show, featuring work from artists across the country.

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Ghost: it's a loose soul, a Swedish death-metal band, slang for disappearing socially. Even the most tangible example here—the band—is slippery and mercurial, with its anonymous lineup and regularly discarded lead singers.

Ghost, a one-night pop-up exhibit curated by artist Sage Dawson, explores the spectrum of meaning within that word, both in the execution of the show and with the work itself, with artists responding in myriad and complex ways. Kate McQuillen's Night House (above) will be represented by a fragment of Styrene, printed with glow-in-the-dark stars and galaxies, that McQuillen affixed to the facade of an Oak Park house for Chicago's 2015 Terrain Biennial. Like Night House, other works in the show are "a fragment of some other project," Dawson says. "Other pieces are in the show because they thematically speak to death or loss. There are a lot of objects in the show that are like artifacts, or they are artifacts; or they’re fragments or traces of something of a project previously done."

This iteration of Ghost grew out of Printeresting's online exhibit of the same name; the projects were documented with a print publication last fall, which will be available at next week's show. Additionally, Dawson invited some of the original participating artists, along with the curators, Jason Urban, R.L. Tillman, and Amze Emmons "to see how they might respond to their own prompt," she says. "I sort of imagined that in putting this project together, they probably had their own ideas about it."

We met up with Dawson at Sump a couple of weeks ago, and she took us on an ephemeral tour of this ephemeral show, via conversation and images on her cell phone. Here are some quick glimpses of work that will be part of Ghost:

"Katherine Miller grew up in St. Louis. She’s showing The Red Book, which is based on researching holy books. She was interested in the belief that text can be thought of as infallible. The legibility of the text is complete obliterated, so that it's no longer functional. It's about mark and color, and gold, and pulls back from the specificity of the text itself."

"[Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky] wrap objects in foil. Sometimes it’s aluminum foil; sometimes it’s copper foil. Typically  they use a long piece of foil to wrap numerous objects in one continuous chain. They once wrapped a shopping cart, and what remained was just a crumpled-up cast of a thing. It was a shell of the shopping cart, but it also became this sad, saggy little remnant. It reminded me of death or some sort of transformation."

"Joey Borovicka creates gorgeous paintings about space. They typically take place in rooms, which are somber and dark with open windows filled with saturated color. There’s an element of imaginative narratives within his work. In one work on paper he mapped a fictional house with secret rooms and hidden passages. The rooms feel solitary. For Hideout, Joey uses sound from old sitcoms and radio shows and we pan the walls of a hideout in the woods."

"Jason and Leslie are based in Austin. They’re showing a collection of objects made for their [project] Hex Outpost. It was originally a retail cart selling goods at roadside prices that was exhibited at Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia. Their project includes a publication that explains that the springboard for the project was recording Pennsylvania Dutch culture and history."

"Amanda Bowles is based here in Saint Louis...She's showing a piece that looks artifact-like that she’s been growing—it's sodium chloride on Dum-Dums and gauze and seated on a building fragment from Saint Louis' Forest Park Hospital. When I visited her studio, she had numerous [pieces]. There was one that was a huge paper shipping tube...it was unrolling a little bit, with sodium chloride growing on it."

This is a fragment of what's in store April 28; in addition to those we've mentioned, the full list of artists includes: Alex Lukas, Imin Yeh, Garry Noland, Emily Belshaw, RL Tillman, Jose Garza, Allison Lacher, J Myszka Lewis, Amze, Emmons, Addoley Dzegede, and Adrienne Outlaw. And as we mentioned, the execution of the show mirrors the theme. It will appear for just one night, then vanish. Even some of the work will cease to exist after next Thursday: according to the artists' directions, the foil-cast Mirror will be balled up and recycled. "It's going to be hard to do that," Dawson says, "but those are the instructions." Of course, the brevity of the show is its power, though in some cases, it allows other projects a slightly longer life.

"I didn’t get to see Kate McQuillen’s Night House in person," Dawson says. "Even though she’s sending the printed material, there’s an element to knowing I didn't see the original when I view the fragment. It's a loss for me. But then we get to see this fragment that’s representative of this larger whole that is gone, and was temporary. Her piece is not only a fragment of a former project, but will take on a new identity in Ghost. The pop-up will allow Night House to live on. It’s a complex feeling—it’s very bittersweet thinking of Kate’s piece. I was excited to show her printed starry sky in St. Louis, so that we could still see a little piece of it, together."

The Luminary is located at 2701 Cherokee. Ghost + Byzantia Harlow happens Thursday, April 28 at 7 p.m., with an artist's talk by Harlow scheduled for 8 p.m. Earlier in the day, visiting artists Allison Lacher and Joey Borovicka lecture at Saint Louis University, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. respectively. More information at luminaryarts.com.

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