Popular, basswood, packing blanket, rubber,
industrial felt, PMC 746, copper sheet, scotch brite pads, magic smooth, turmeric
5′ x 4′ x 5′
2018
Collaboration with Llewellyn Fletcher
Non-Orientable Lavender Menace is a sculpture resulting from a year-long series of conversations and collaborative experiments between Berlier and Fletcher exploring support, protection, queerness, ecology, community, interdependence, and strength in difference.
Non-Orientable Lavender Menace was inspired by a shared fascination with the paleo-geologic form near Cincinnati (Berlier’s home-town, and Fletcher’s new-home) called the “Cincinnati Arch.” In this paleo-geologic movement, the bottom of an unimaginably old ocean floor has pushed its way up to the surface outside of Cincinnati, so ancient brachiopod fossils can be found in the dirt on an everyday walk. We loved this twisting of power, where the bottom becomes the top, and what is unimaginably old, comes up to greet us in contemporary times. This seemed like a “queering” of time – disrupting and confusing usual expectations and hierarchies of time, earth, ecology, and power.
The mobius form offered a visual metaphor for this queer, non-orientable idea: what was the bottom is now the top, geologically speaking. There is no front or back, the inside becomes the outside. It is also a hole. The collaborators have literally flipped hometowns and ended up in the others’ place of birth.
Non-orientable is a term inspired by contemporary ecologist Timothy Morton’s books “Ecology without Nature,” and “Queer Ecology.” The term “Lavender Menace” is a reclaiming of the origin of the term, which comes from the 1960’s when straight women from National Organization of Women (NOW) disliked the lesbian movement. The used Lavender Menace to describe butch lesbians, as lesbians battled for their place in 1960s feminism movement.
In the Non-Orientable Lavender Menace, strata of unique material layers twist endlessly, given support by, and giving support to a chaotic field of scaffold structure.
