Ghost Corn, a multi-media installation by photographer Marie Craig and video artist Melissa Shaak, immerses the viewer in a field of shifting perspectives of a remembered and reinvented landscape. Inspired by the cornfields surrounding Craig’s childhood home, the artists mix cyanotype, video, and sound to transform the memory of a lost place.
Craig’s large-format cyanotypes of cornstalks, printed on eight-foot-high silk panels, are suspended throughout the space, surrounding viewers with photographic traces of the recollected landscape. Gently stirred by air currents, the panels shift and sway, their images overlapping and separating as viewers move among them. The silk’s blue translucence blurs boundaries and creates an environment that is at once tangible and elusive.
Shaak’s video projections move across and through the cyanotype panels, animating the space with lights, birds, and other flights of fancy. As the ghost corn looks skyward from its ground position, another landscape emerges, one that imagines what the corn might have seen or dreamed. The angles and shapes of the projected images continually realign, adding to the richly layered sensory experience.
The audioscape, with its ethereal and echoing sound, was created by composer Katie Semro. It gives voice to Craig’s repeating rows of cornstalks, illuminated by Shaak’s multiple looping videos, in examining the persistence of memory and our desire to reclaim and reimagine that which has been lost.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Marie Craig works primarily in photography, often incorporating cyanotype, photograms, archival pigment printing, and layered mixed media processes. She has exhibited extensively throughout New England and internationally, and co-founded Fountain Street Gallery in Boston, MA. mariecraigart.com
Melissa Shaak is a Somerville, MA artist working in video as well as acrylics and mixed media on paper. She is a member of Brickbottom Artists Association and was a core member of Fountain Street Gallery from 2019 - 2024. Her studio is located at River Street Artists/Waltham Mills. www.melissashaak.net
Katie Semro is a composer whose music rides a beautiful line between modern and romantic aesthetics. It is intelligent without being obscure, clear without being simplistic, and cohesive without being predictable. Semro’s music has been performed throughout North America. katiesemro.com
INSTALLATION NOTES
Ghost Corn can be scaled to fit different exhibition spaces, from a minimum of six to a maximum of forty 8’ x 4.5’ panels. Two complementary videos by Melissa Shaak, Kernels and Carry In, Carry Out, may be included with the installation at the curator's discretion.
Ghost Corn 3:16, two-channel looping video
Kernels 5:35, single channel looping video
Carry In, Carry Out 5:58, six-channel looping video