Marianne Vitale creates monuments from the spectres of American industrial expansion – bridges, railroad tracks, freight train engines, dams, factories, outhouses – in an excoriating critique of the contemporary collapse of Western society. She burns, breaks, bruises, and builds anew, forcing us to interrogate our own histories through the objects we abandon in the name of progress. For The Milk of Dreams, Vitale presents two series of works in a secluded garden part of the Giardino delle Vergini. For fifteen years, Vitale has constructed scale models of North American bridges in her studio, taking them outdoors to burn them and eventually exhibiting their charred skeletons. Installed here are seven of her now-iconic burned bridges cast in bronze. If the bridges portray the ruptured connection nodes of a climate-ravaged future, Bottle People (2020–2021), a series of liquor bottles swaddled in fabric and cast in bronze, represents a bestiary of ancient microbial phantasms unleashed from the ashen earth. Dozens of these gesturing figures, suspended off walls as if levitating, portray agony, despair, hope and amusement.
Melanie Kress
