Ghost Corn

With audioscape by Katie Semro

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 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.