Albertus Gorman

For over twenty years I have been the self-designated Artist at Exit 0 and the “unofficial artist in residence” at the Falls of the Ohio State Park in Clarksville, Indiana. The park is located on the northbank of the Ohio River immediately across from my home in Louisville. The Falls of the Ohio is a unique geographical feature and is the only place along the entire 981 mile length of the Ohio River that you needed to portage your boat. It is the reason why Louisville is where it is. Historically, the park is rich with thousands of years of indigenous American inhabitation. And this was also the place where the formative Lewis and Clark Expedition both began and ended their journey. Moving back much further in time, the Falls of the Ohio are a unique window into the history of life. Preserved in the limestone of the riverbed are coral reef fossils from the Devonian Period which were the highpoints of life as it existed 400 million years ago. Today, I can stand on ancient marine fossils, look past 19th century bridges, and see a contemporary city on the horizon. The compression of all that time and space is something I feel when I visit the Falls of the Ohio. Today, the Falls of the Ohio have been designated as an Indiana state park. In all that I have attempted along the river, I have tried to center my art in the service of life. The site remains a dynamic, living environment full of wildlife, particularly bird life which I frequently reference and interpret in my artwork. The Ohio River is also among the most commercialized rivers in the world and among the most affected by man’s actions. My project as the Artist at Exit 0 has been influenced by the manmade, river materials that wash ashore and continue to marr my experience of the park. One thing I have been interested in as a layperson is could I observe climate change occurring in my area and I believe that I have through increased rainfall and flooding over the years. Exit 0 is the I-65 interstate exit for the park, but it also feels very existential and open to interpretation to me. If I went to Exit 0, what would I find? Everything I have made has been sourced from the river. Early on in my project, I decided I could only use river materials collected from the Falls and I have remained true to that for over twenty years. The park and river have provided and has become my art supply center and principal gallery. Most of the site specific projects I have completed exist now only in photographs and through online platforms like Instagram. Overtime, I have developed a vocabulary of materials that include some of the worst stuff like polystyrene, various plastics, and even coal. I have also created a series of aesthetic forms that are also expressions of the river. Among those include: creating absurd Styrofoam sculptures, making large, site specific, plastic assemblages, and forming ironic collections of objects I find washed into the park. I think of what I do as a collaboration with the Ohio River. The river selects and acts upon materials and shapes them in unique ways that I try to respect. Much of what I do can be seen as an accommodation with the river. I try to find a balancing point between my need to form and create meaning while respecting the hard won forms the river sends my way. In all the years I have been doing this work, I realized it had to be about more than building awareness about environmental challenges. That boat has long sailed away. What I have discovered instead is that people are very interested in what I do at the river. If it looks like fun to make stuff…it is! Imagine how thrilling it is to take something with no intrinsic value and to create something that elevates the ordinary into the extraordinary. That is true alchemy! The materials I use are free and weren’t given the dignity of recycling, so you can’t really make a mistake with them. A lot of what I think I do out on the river is give people permission to be the creatives they were born to be. I think this is key, in order to save the world, we need to encourage people to cultivate an aesthetic dimension that elevates their experience of being alive and the rest will follow.