Jean Shin and Brian Ripel: Retreat

Collaborators Jean Shin and Brian Ripel collect everyday materials to create sculptural installations that become poetic portraits of the places and communities in which they work. At deCordova, Shin and Ripel mine the local history of retreat through the language of art and architecture in three related investigations. In Tea House, located on deCordova’s Rooftop Terrace, and in the installations Castles in the Air and Measuring the Depths of his own Nature on view in the 4th floor Foster Galleries, the artists consider the shape and vision of idealized escape.

Their interest in retreat was inspired by the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s move to nearby Walden Pond in 1845 and museum  founder Julian de Cordova’s summer escape to Flint’s Pond in 1882. In these installations, Shin and Ripel harness the shared impulse to seek refuge with the materials that made these physical and psychological havens possible: pencils and tea. The artists build from Thoreau’s familial connection to pencil manufacturing and his vocations as author and land surveyor as well as de Cordova’s role as tea merchant, to engage local cultural and industrial histories.

Earlier this summer, as part of the three-part project, Shin and Ripel invited visitors to participate in the act of retreat by withdrawing to deCordova’s Rooftop to enjoy a cup of tea in their Tea House. The thousands of tea bags used by Museum visitors not only became material for Castles in the Air, but now also sculpt a collective portrait of the deCordova community that convened to participate. Building on the cultural and material histories of our surroundings as well as our own social network, Shin and Ripel ask us to consider the shaping of architectural form and the mapping of landscape as physical embodiments of personal, philosophical, and psychological retreat.