Rachael Champion: Interstate 495 is a Terminal Moraine

Hales Project Room

64 Delancey St, New York

Hales Gallery is proud to announce Rachael Champion: Interstate 495 is a Terminal Moraine at the New York Project Room. This is Champion’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Rachael Champion’s site-specific sculptures and installations engage in a discourse surrounding the complex relationship between our built environment and the natural world. Her works address the corporeality of the materials we extract, transform, and consume and the consequences of these actions on the physical characteristics of landscapes and ecosystems. Champion questions the layered complexities of our ever-changing physical environment coalescing at an intersection between architecture, industry, biology, and geology.

The site of interest in Interstate 495 is a Terminal Moraine is Champion’s birthplace, Long Island, New York. For this exhibition, Champion delves into the paleohistory of Long Island and its manifestation in contemporary life. The title of the exhibition uses Interstate 495 (also known as the “Long Island Expressway,” “L.I.E.,” and “The Expressway”) as a metaphor to link these deep time relationships. I-495 runs through the very center of Long Island and functions as the primary vehicular conduit to one of the most densely populated places in the US. The road is situated along a terminal moraine left over from the receding glaciers of the Earth’s most recent Ice Age.

Central to the exhibition is an investigation into the Atlantic horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), a 450-million-year-old species of arthropods, which live in the shallow coastal waters on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. This species of great prehistoric significance plays a paramount role in the biomedical industry due to the extraordinary characteristics of its blue blood, which is routinely extracted for the detection and quantification of bacterial endotoxins. For Interstate 495 is a Terminal Moraine, Champion has collaborated with CERCOM, Molloy College’s Center for Environmental Research and Coastal Ocean Monitoring. This marine science laboratory located on the Great South Bay studies the Atlantic horseshoe crab through captive breeding and conservation research.

The installation, which sprawls along the floor of the gallery, integrates textures of suburbia with coastal plant life native to the shores of Long Island. Floating amongst the sea of pink fiberglass insulation foam are bottles of an opaque blue liquid, a facsimile of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), the blood of the Atlantic horseshoe crab. A series of cylindrical photographic sculptures that collage imagery from CERCOM and a variety of Long Island landscapes punctuate the adjacent wall and feature both industrial areas where raw materials are extracted, processed, and recycled and the natural habitats of the Atlantic horseshoe crab, including Captree Island in the Great South Bay and McAllister County Park on the Long Island Sound. Contrasting industrial supplies with ecological matter, Champion calls into question our interrelated expectations of the two as they fit into Long Island’s rich and evolving material history.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachael Champion (b. 1982, Long Island, New York, USA) graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools in 2010. Champion lives and works in London.

Champion’s work has been exhibited in a number of internationally recognized institutions including The Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Science Gallery (IE), Camden Arts Centre (UK), Modern Art Oxford (UK), Zabludowicz Collection (UK, FI), and Socrates Sculpture Park (US). She has made a number of site-specific installations in a variety of contexts including commercial galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and remote landscapes. Major recent projects include Blackwall Reach (London, UK), Carbon Flux (Offaly, IE), Discoverers of Onkalo (Sarvisalo, FI), New Spring Gardens (Nine Elms, London, UK), Raze Bloom (Royal Academy of Arts / Hales Gallery, London, UK), and Plough Layer, Source Rupture (Art Basel, HK). Awards and honors include the Red Mansion Art Prize (2010), the Arts Foundation Award for sculpture (2013), and for the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Gala (2016). In 2017, she completed her first permanent installation in Sarvisalo, the Zabludowicz Collection's outpost in Finland and this year, her installation Blackwall Reachwas included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s triennial exhibition, The London Open 2018.