The Justice

'LIKE NERVE ENDINGS FROM EVERYWHERE': The coiled wire is intended to evoke both tension and the open space to evoke the possibility of tenderness.

"The exhibit, Turbulence and Tenderness, is a reflection of our times, portraying the tensions of chaos along with the comfort and protective cradling of the familiar," reads Carol Prost's G'08 artist statement. "Turbulence and Tenderness" hangs from the ceiling of Schwartz Hall before the glass curtain that forms that building's north wall and consists of tightly coiled wire and found objects such as a bicycle seat and melted wax that clog the wiry spirals like detritus in a spider's web.

Prost, a research staffer at the Heller School and a graduate student in the Cultural Production program at Brandeis, said she thought of the wire as similar to a line, like a line drawn on paper, but in a three-dimensional environment. "I love to draw," she said in an interview with the Justice. "It was very much about taking a line and drawing in space, … shading with wire by making density."

The project is Prost's capstone in her Cultural Production master's. Prost said she was "really looking at the history of objects and meanings of objects and how we transform those. … There's war, there's strife, there's tension coming at as like nerve endings from everywhere."

The idea of nerve endings is certainly echoed in the long, dangling wire sculptures, which tend to have a dense spine of coiled wire with the outer shape created by more, less tightly coiled wire that surrounds the spine. Says the artist's statement: "I allow the wire the freedom to take on erratic, turbulent and surprised movement, while methodically and carefully bringing it back to center. In the process, a wonderful sense of rhythm and the swirling, cyclical harmony of repeated movement is experienced in the body."

Prost's focus in her Cultural Production program was memorials, so candle wax was a familiar element in her art and her research. The melted wax in "Turbulence and Tenderness" is intended to echo "hot melted tears and remembering." The other objects caught in the wire, including dried roses, metal washers and a bicycle seat, are intended to "give one pause to see the familiar in a new light," in the tradition of the 1970s Italian art movement arte povera, "poor art".

Getting the art into Schwartz Hall wasn't as easy as Prost expected. "The making of the sculpture was a wonderful birthing. Taking care of [securing the space] was a painful labor," she said. After getting permission to have the art displayed from the ceiling of the building, Prost had to have facilities workers hang the works from the ceiling using the lift they use to change the lightbulbs.

The exhibition is Prost's first solo exhibit.

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