Proximities
2026 On view
Artist Emma McCormick Goodhart
DetailsSandstone (Arkansas), limestone marble, mica-encrusted granite, druzy quartz and red earth (all Missouri), CAVE 0 fragrance oil and eau de parfum, mitti attar (wet clay absolute), scent diffusers, neon, high-density polyurethane, electric scent diffusers, Osage orthography.
Curator Jordan Carter
Address
101 Chouteau Ave
St. Louis, MO
Site Description
Accessibility: Free parking is available in a gravel parking lot north of the warehouse and along Chouteau Avenue. This warehouse has been temporarily modified to be ADA accessible for the exhibition. There are outdoor ADA-accessible restrooms and ramps into the exhibition space. The interior floors are concrete and may be uneven in some areas. The silo is not ADA accessible.
Artwork Details
About the Artwork
Emma McCormick Goodhart is an artist, writer, researcher, and dramaturge who experiments with deep-time histories of the senses, especially in sound and scent. Her work is staged inside a former grain silo above a subterranean stream. Here, stones are scored with glyphs and textures legible to the hand. Among stones comprising Proximities, you can feel a relief of Venus’s surface. Other stones are marked with Osage language phrases, translated as “sky casts red,” “moon milk,” “to etch marks by force or inanimate phenomena,” and the term for computer, literally “metal mind” or “contemplating metal.” Inside the room, you can smell CAVE 0, the artist’s perfume. The scent is derived from a mixture of cave waters, cicada nymph shells, manganese, microbial moonmilk, and other rare-earth traces.
Together, neon and rock suggest wayfinding as a sensory practice. One is read at a distance; the other through touch.
The words come from the artist’s dialogue with Osage language scholar Braxton Redeagle.