Haena Chu

    What does the past smell like? Sound like? Taste like? What color is it? What does it mean to colorize time? Perhaps visible in this particular assemblage of work is a tendency towards sepia, towards white and brown and beige, not drained of color, but not saturated in it either. It tastes like paper, like glue and paint and clay. Not bland, but not rich. It smells like an art studio. It sounds like your breathing as you look at it, your thoughts as you think them. Sensory archaeology, a field of recent interest, considers these sounds, tastes, and smells to be just as material as an artifact, just as necessary to the picture of a site as bone shards and pottery. Color, however, is of particular interest. How does an archaeologist re-incarnate the colors of the past? Thinking through this, we have constructed the term archaeochromatics to describe the creative act of archaeologizing color, and colorizing archaeology. To name only a few points of interest, archaeochromatics engages with the ageing of colors over time, the color of landscapes, seasonal color changes and environmental factors, color perception, and much more. A Georgia O’Keeffe quote comes to mind, as we think of these linkages: “All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.” Art and archaeology both exist in color, on a page and in a site all at once.    -- Mira Baum

Renata Del Riego