PERPLEXITIES
2022 - present
statement
What exists between a burden and that which holds it?
DRAWINGS
VIDEO
This project is made possible through residencies at Waterfall Arts in Belfast, ME (with support from The Onion Foundation) and at the Object Hotel in Bisbee, AZ.
DRAWINGS 2021
As a counterbalance to the exclusivity she observed in the conspicuous care of yachts, Nina made these drawings while considering what else is carried in more private realms. Created using marine motor lubricant and industrial pulp mill waste—materials that point to certain non-recreational realities in Maine—these drawings abstract what is uplifted and are meditations on the kinds of invisible emotional lifting we all do. See more drawings.
overburden 2021
33 minute two-channel video
videography by Erin Elder
video editing by Melinda Frame
soundscape by Darius Holbert
overburden: (verb) to give someone a weight that is too great to carry.
overburden: (noun) the geologic material that is removed to expose a desired underground mineral
From 1902-1987 the Dodge Phelps Corporation dumped massive piles of slag along the United States/Mexico border in Douglas, Arizona. This final product of copper mining is a toxic landscape defined by radioactivity, infertile soil, and acidified rain and rivers. It is a dramatic and dangerous place that has become a theater for United States politics as enacted by border patrol employees, walls, and myriad forms of surveillance and incarceration technologies.
Overburden documents Nina’s attempt to care for and carry away the slag. She uses hand-sewn devices, accentuating both her strength and her softness, to uplift and dignify the pulverized, leached, melted, dumped, and forgotten rocks.
TONGUE STONES 2021
10 minute looping video
Hannah Perrine Mode - videographer
Tongue Stones depicts Nina Elder’s futile attempt to gain intimacy, knowledge, and empathy with geologic materials by forcing them into her mouth. Filmed at the edge of a receding glacier in Alaska, this video is an inquiry into displaced and disregarded materials. In Tongue Stones, Nina embodies and implicates herself in the legacies of disruption, extraction, and neglect that shape the American Western landscape. By stretching herself beyond capacity, she manifests the exploitation and voracity that emboldens capitalism, and the overburdening that creates trauma in human and ecological bodies. The title Tongue Stones connotes the carved stones that are placed in the mouths of the dead in many cultures.