Skye Gilkerson

sound vibration and ink on paper

With the process of paper marbling, ink floats on the surface of water and then the pattern is captured with a piece of paper, leaving behind a monoprint. For this series, the water tray rests on large speakers playing sounds of unknown origin collected by NASA and NOAA from outer space and the deep sea, vibrating the surface of the water and generating the ink swirls. I love thinking of these images as communication from the far reaches of below and above, a way of connecting to the larger cycles of the universe, mysterious and unknowable.

thirty six attempts to memorize Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

This project began when I was a teenager and first encountered the poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry. I tried to commit it to memory at the time, but was confronted by my own difficulty with memorization and set the project aside.

Many years later, I was reminded of Wendell Berry's writing while immersed in the expanse of stars and wildlife at the Jentel Foundation art residency. I decided to revive the project, this time typing out the poem each morning, adding a line or two as I was able, until I could finally write the whole thing from memory.

This book is a document of my process.

I found myself experiencing the poem itself differently than when I was younger, and at the end of the book is a personal essay exploring the ways that my relationship to the poem has shifted over nearly two decades.

Buy here.

AI imagery hand-cut from window film

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, published in 1909, presents a fictional world in which the main character spends life receiving materials and messages by pressing buttons, delivering lectures via screens, and talking to acquaintances from her little pod. We feel the seduction of comfort as well as the eerie loneliness of a life lived in manufactured perfection devoid of contact with biology. The imagery in the first piece was generated by an AI drawing prompted by the following text from The Machine Stops: 

"Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars." 

The companion piece features a planet and the night sky, cut from frosted window film and shimmering with light from the other side of the window. The imagery is inspired by text from Trafik by Rikki Ducornet, a 2021 novel set in a distant future, without Earth, in which the main character travels around space mining minerals in an asteroid belt, longing for the daily rhythms of a planet to call home:

“I need a planet I can walk on,” she says out loud. “I need to wake up in a morning to a sun’s light, and sleep in the dark of night, beneath a familiar moon and stars I can recognize and call by name.”

linen, book board, silver leaf on newspaper pages

This project is inspired by medieval Books of Hours, illuminated manuscripts that served as time pieces of sorts, containing prayers for certain hours, days, and seasons. 

My book is made of pages from the New York Times from 2019, when NASA released the first image of a black hole. At 55 million light-years from Earth, this image is a window far back in time. Scattered throughout the same newspaper are more images of space exploration, as well as photos from another story about melting icecaps in Alaska. Seeing these images shuffled together throughout the paper felt like a practice of looking to the distant past and then looking to the present and near future, looking up, and out, and far away, and then back to our here and now, the earth shifting beneath our feet.

newsprint, ink made of ash remains from burning a stack of New York Times every new moon for one year

Every month on the new moon, I burned the stack of New York Times from that month, conflating natural cycles with human experience as represented in daily newspaper stories. 

With the remaining ashes, I made ink and created ink-blot drawings on newsprint the size of the newspaper. The drawings are made in the style of the Rorschach ink blot test, historically used in psychological evaluation. These drawings become the location of psychological projection. According to the theory of the Rorschach test, each viewer interprets the shapes based on their own psychology. 

photo by Erin Sweeny

still from video installation

A companion piece to New Moons, this accompanying video documents a burning process in which the small, crackling fire in the darkness become like the moon, a planet, or a distant star. 

silver leaf on unfolded pages of the New York Times

This series uses pages of the New York Times on dates selected for cosmic events such as meteor showers, full moons, or the total solar eclipse. Covered in silver leaf, the pages quietly reflect the world around them with a mirrored surface, reflecting the viewer's gaze and suggesting both censorship and memorialization of the words beneath. The edges of each image or text box break through the surface to reveal fragments of the hidden narrative. The silver leaf references depictions of atmospheric space from medieval illuminated manuscripts; specific details of daily events move toward abstracted space, conflating the everyday with cosmic. The series embraces the language of archiving to become a calendar: one newspaper page for each month of 2017.

Photos by Etienne Frossard

vanity mirrors, pedestals

triptych of letters to private space travel companies
 

objects collected from walking 124 miles horizontally, twice the vertical distance to the Kármán line, commonly considered the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space

collection of books that predict the end of the world, arranged in order of forecasted dates

two turntables playing The Smiths song, Please, Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want

Edges touch so as one plays forward, the other is pushed in reverse.

found text collage

This large collage is comprised of punctuation marks cut from newspapers. The size of the paper is the size as the newspaper page that served as the original source material, and the title derives from that day's news. To create the composition I scattered the punctuation marks randomly on one side of the paper, then carefully replicated the marks on the other side. Referencing Rorschach images, this series engages the newspaper as a location for telling stories and making meaning from the otherwise random events unfolding around us.

unfolded page of the New York Times with punctuation removed, ink

Each drawing in this series is made of an unfolded page from the New York Times, with every punctuation mark removed. The remaining paper is saturated with its own medium: black ink, leaving a cosmos of blank spaces. Each piece represents one month of the year; the titles are drawn from the unseen text of each page, zooming into specific content from that day, ranging from individual tragedies and victories to world wide events.

Photos by Etienne Frossard

found text collage

This large collage is comprised of punctuation marks cut from newspapers. The size of the paper is the size as the newspaper page that served as the original source material, and the title derives from that day's news. The language from a newspaper is stripped away, leaving only a constellation of punctuation marks.

wood, plexi, paper, ink, landscape

An homage to the famous photograph by the same name, the Pale Blue Dot viewfinder transforms any landscape into a glimmering dot of light, like planet earth seen from deep space.
 

dual channel video

Unending consists of two videos playing across from each other, each recorded at the same time on opposite sides of the earth. The sunrise was filmed in the East Coast of the United States, and the simultaneous sunset was filmed in its diametric opposite, Perth, Australia. 

Thanks to filmmaker Josh Hopkins for the video footage from Australia.

wood, mirrors

 

wood, etched plexi

solar string lights on found trees

This ongoing project is a response to my experiences living in shrinking cities, and watching as trees inhabit our abandoned structures.

Constructing architecture is our way of claiming and delineating space, and of separating ourselves from nature.  Without vigilant human intervention, however, natural cycles quickly erode these distinctions as plants take root, finding what they need for survival within the cracked mortar of overlooked buildings.  

Wrapped in lights, these trees now recall their carefully tended counterparts living in parks and by sidewalk cafes, highlighting the difference between maintained and monitored spaces, and those on the periphery.

The lights are solar powered, and are triggered by the setting sun.

paper

An homage to the orphan trees growing from cracks in neighboring buildings, this paper tree perches just outside the window of a second story gallery within the atrium of Towson University.

frosted window film

For this gallery window facing the interior of an office building in Washington, DC, I recreated the view from my parent’s house in rural South Dakota. On their living room window, I recreated the view of the office hallway.

one day installation made of firewood

This one-day project spontaneously grew from an artist residency conducted in silence. Where medieval labyrinths compressed long pilgrimages into shorter walks to serve as metaphors for solitary journeys, I wanted this version to be more like a game, inviting interaction. Two spiral pathways circle one another with entrances on opposite ends, and as participants move through the spiral pathway they orbit each other, eventually meeting in the middle.

tape on window

overlapping live feeds from every place I've lived

video projected onto window

tape on window

adhesive and dust on gallery floor

hand-cut newspaper pages from each of the places I've lived

frottage

From exhibition catalogue essay by Rachel Bubis:

In Try to Try and Try an Experiment (in Yves Klein Blue), Gilkerson took rubbings from the raised surface of a sign that sits at the base of a winding road to Byrdcliffe Colony, the oldest operating arts and crafts colony in America founded in 1902 as "an experiment in utopian living." Being in the setting of this history got her thinking about her own efforts at utopia, her attempts to create the perfect life, and our collective experiments in urban development. As Gilkerson sees it, being part of a community is being part of a collective attempt to make it a more and more perfect place. 

Gilkerson points out that "the etymology of utopia literally means 'no place.' By definition, utopia can never be. In this sense, the labor toward utopia is a constant experiment, always evolving, never arriving."

found text collage

hand-cut magazine pages

found text collage

economic graphs collage