Devon Stackonis

media release: RETAINING WALLS

MFA Thesis Exhibition by Devon Stackonis

Exhibition Dates: April 15-May 10, 2024

Exhibition Reception: Friday, May 3, 5:00-9:00 pm

Tandem Press is pleased to host RETAINING WALLS, a Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Devon Stackonis, University of Wisconsin-Madison MFA Candidate and 2023-2024 Tandem Press Curatorial Project Assistant. The reception for this exhibition coincides with MMoCA’s Spring 2024 Gallery Night as well as a performance in Tandem Press’s Friday Jazz Series, a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music.

In RETAINING WALLS, Stackonis presents an artist book installation rooted in ancestral lineage, resource extraction, and inhabitation of the Pennsylvania Coal Region. The exhibition is centered around a controlled space within which one may interact with Stackonis’ artist book while objects and projected images emphasize certain visuals relating to the narrative. Echoing the form of 19th-century dental manuscripts, this bound series of etchings addresses the lasting psychological, health, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts of an obsolete industry.

Artist Biography

Devon Stackonis is a visual artist and printmaker specializing in mezzotint and intaglio processes. Stackonis’ current body of work serves as a personal reflection of the mountainous coal regions of Eastern Pennsylvania where she grew up and the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of extractive industry. The inhabitants and the landscape never truly recovered from this industrial past, and she finds this to be compelling grounds for her creative practice. She received her BFA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and worked as Assistant in Printmaking at Bucknell University from 2018-2020. Her work is held in the Kohler Art Library Artist Book Collection at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, The National Library and Archives of Québec, and Special Collections at the University of Washington Libraries, Seattle. Since 2021, Stackonis has been pursuing her MFA in Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and is currently the Curatorial Project Assistant at Tandem Press.

Exhibition Statement

Spanning the last decade, my work has dealt with my ancestral labor history, resource extraction, and inhabitation of the Pennsylvania Coal Region. Ancestors on both sides of my family immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late 19th century and worked in coal mines tunneled into the distinctive Anthracite veins which run along the Appalachian Mountain range. My great, and great great grandfathers who worked in these mines had their lives cut short in the industry, with few surpassing the age of forty. Several generations later, some members of my family still reside there, amidst the steep mountains and black piles of coal waste, rivers tainted orange with acid mine drainage, and dilapidated mining structures which remain. Echoing the form of 19th century medical and dental manuscripts, RETAINING WALLS addresses the lasting psychological, health, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts of an obsolete industry. 

In my research surrounding coal mining disasters and occupational health hazards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I also revisited the story of my grandmother and her twelve siblings having their secondary teeth forcefully removed at a young age in the coal regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania. I began exploring the shared language of teeth and the coal mining industry in my writing as well as conditions that apply to both: extraction via drilling and pulling, collapsing roofs and interior spaces, receding and eroding surfaces, retaining walls and supports, and the more common connecting phrase, mouth of the mine. I am interested in the environmental and health conditions which continue to surface even after the most invasive extractive operations had closed, and those which appear in generations thereafter.

Over the past 15 years, I have endured my own medical and dental problems, cranio-facial chronic pain, and several ineffective surgeries and procedures. As I was undergoing intensive TMJ treatment and postural therapy over the past three years, I thought much more about teeth and jaw alignment, and how repetitive labor, prolonged stress or misuse can change or limit the function of one’s body. In this work, I consider epigenetics which involves intergenerational transmission of trauma. Existing in an impoverished community, drinking affected water, and being exposed to industrial waste will certainly affect one’s health, however, a parent’s exposures, elements of lifestyle, and traumatic experiences can also be passed to the next generation. While drawing material connections to my ancestral labor history, I also began to see behavioral patterns, abusive cycles, and poor overall health perpetuated by living conditions.

RETAINING WALLS intimately explores these themes with a semi-fictional narrative based on my experiences in Central and Northeastern Pennsylvania. I express observations of my own chronic pain and vague diagnosis and of people I lived with at the time and strangers whose behavioral tendencies or physical ailments mirrored the conditions of the landscape in uncanny ways. The dream-like visual imagery invites association with the abstracted teeth forms, furthering the connection between the health of the land and bodily wellbeing. To some extent, we are all products of our external environments. To care for and maintain our own bodies, we must also care for the environments we inhabit. The embedded etchings are rendered from observed dental molds and cast impressions, which within this body of work serve as a symbol for extraction at the human-scale and more broadly as a symbol of extraction in the world: altered landscapes, uprooted communities, and the human cost of extractive industry. 

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