The Fantastical Reconstruction of the Epine GY7

In the middle of a winter night in 1948, off the western coast of Iceland, the British fishing trawler Epine GY7 smashed into rocks. Five men were saved and fourteen drowned. What is left of the ship lies rusting on the black beach at Djúpalónssandur.

In 2009 Silverstein scattered her boyfriend’s ashes on this beach and filmed the year that followed; it became the documentary Afterglow. In the summer of 2018 she returned with friends and, over five nights, they made rubbings on canvas of every fragment of the wreck. Only afterwards did she realise that on the same beach where she had dispersed his remains, she was now gathering remains back into new forms. In her Los Angeles studio the rubbings became large-scale “fantastical reconstructions” of the ship, shown at MoCA Tucson with Wind Sounds, a nine-screen work made from Afterglow, and Podiums for the Dead, fourteen podiums holding redacted transcripts of the tapes.

“Art is a response to knowing something is impossible. This is not an attempt to recreate history, but rather to propose a new monument, a monument of a monument. Not to report but to transform.”Ali Silverstein