\*sk\*/ey-

Taking its title from ‘sk-ey’, the proto-Indo-European word for splitting or shedding, Marguerite’s project \*sk\*/ey intimates the slow mutation of land masses and the changing geographies of Earth. This immersive installation opens with the eponymous video work, whose footage was originally shot, unscripted, during Marguerite’s time in arid, San Luis Valley, Colorado, creating the earthwork Orisons (2024). The video work recounts an imagined series of events involving an eternal sun, a trapped spirit, the death of a prairie dog and a great migration. Speaking of the formation of life on Earth, and the arrival of humankind with its time, rituals and influence, the video foreshadows the scene that lays beyond it. Marguerite has transformed the gallery space into the desert environment of this speculative world, wherein the surface layer of Earth has been sloughed off like dead skin, allowing energies to be released from the earth into the sky. Reaching, exposed root systems come to life while earthbound lifeforms, in turn, become rootless and prepare to take flight. Large-scale sculptures emerge from the ground, wrought from organic materials including 150-year-old walnut, handblown glass, embellished silk. Other sculptures incorporate draperies of waxed felt and long tendrils of raw wool, and sit perched at the gallery’s walls like statuesque, winged creatures. Exemplary of one key aspect of Marguerite’s working methodology, in which artworks develop out of ‘what if’ scenarios, \*sk\*/ey considers a nomadic, post-human world born of necessity and perpetual adaptation.