Get lost in time-and devour a prehistoric feast-at Storm King's new exhibitions

Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley offers 500 acres of rolling hills, open skies, and large contemporary sculptures. Three new summer special exhibitions add meditations on history and nature and how the past relates to present and future. Anicka Yi’s Message from the Mud places visitors at a fictional archaeological dig where tall columns filled with organic materials rise from a shallow pool. Soil science techniques from the 1880s are used to mix soil with water from the museum’s South Ponds inside the pillars, creating habitats for algae and microbial colonies that form changing layers of color. The site also includes concrete engravings of imagined technological fossils. Before Skeletons, Before Teeth presents a one-day prehistoric culinary experience with a Stone Altar centerpiece featuring edible foods shaped like rocks, flowers, fungi, and layered items.

"Anicka Yi’s Message from the Mud brings visitors to a fictional archaeological dig site, where tall, acyclic columns filled with organic materials emerge from a shallow pool, like an ecological monument left by an unknown society. Using a soil science technique developed in the 1880s, Yi combined soil with water from the museum's South Ponds within the pillars to create habitats for algae and microbial colonies to grow. The result is verdant layers of rich greens and browns that will change over the course of the exhibition's run as they are exposed to the sun and elements."

"As you walk around the site, be sure to look beneath your feet to find more evidence of Yi's "biofiction": concrete engravings of imagined technological fossils inspired by the artist's Precambrian Panels (2024). The work links distant pasts, both real and imagined, to the present landscape through materials that develop over time. The changing colors and the fossil-like engravings invite close attention to what remains, what grows, and what can be imagined from traces."

"Yi's fascination with the distant past, both real and imagined, is further crystallized in Before Skeletons, Before Teeth, a "prehistoric culinary experience" conceived by the artist in collaboration with Care of Chan that will be open to the public for one day only on June 27. The centerpiece of the menu is the Stone Altar, a banquet table covered with lush canapés of cascading rocks and pebbles that are actually chocolate, decadent butter mounds covered in edible flowers, cheeses that resemble (delicious) fungi, and jars of layere"

Read at Time Out New York