A scene suggestive of the Abd el-Rassul family discovery the royal cache years before officially revealing it in 1881, and their sale of artifacts and mummies through antiquities dealers
I was introduced to Ramesses I, the founder of Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, in his then 468 Wellington Street West residence in Toronto in the late 1990’s by Bill Jamieson. It is difficult to describe my sense of excitement, as the identity of the mummy was just in the process of being confirmed. Canadian Egyptologist Gayle Gibson had made evaluations. There had been discussions with the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta for a possible sale and transfer of residence. After scans, anatomical analyses, and comparisons with royal mummies Jamieson’s Egyptian collection went to Atlanta in 1999. Then in 2003, Ramesses I received a ceremonial state welcome and was placed on display in Egypt’s Luxor Museum, barely two miles from where Ramesses I ruled just over 3,200 years ago.
William Jamieson, Treasure Hunter
Socially, it had been the shrunken heads that broke the ice. Jamieson’s purchase of the Niagara Falls Museum collection, however, was the big story. The timing mattered. He came across as a grand curiosity-cabinet figure at a time when museums were beginning to reconsider the ethics of collecting. Essentially, he had been a Toronto contractor whose loft became a museum, and who now holds a place in history for discovering a lost Egyptian pharaoh.
William Jamieson acquired not only the Egyptian collection from the old Niagara Falls Museum but also many of its other ethnographic and natural history objects—including a number of shrunken heads (tsantsas)
In broad strokes, civilizations have been defined by their metals; from stone to bronze and iron. The best ages were “golden ages.” The story of the “Bronze Age Collapse,” as told by Eric Cline, tells of collapsing empires through the rupture of supply chains, and a forced innovation. While more difficult, blacksmiths had turned to iron making, setting the stage for the emergence of classical Greece. Bronze Age kingdoms had come to an abrupt end; Minoans, Mycenaeans, Trojans, Hittites, and Babylonians – gone.
Cassels Donation, Grängesberg, Sweden, the local movie theater through the 1950’s
By 1952-53, My father’s employment had drifted from SKF ball bearings to mining iron in Grängesberg, Sweden. British financier, Sir Ernest Cassel, had cast a distinct shadow over the town in the form of his 1900 “donation.” For a while, it became a local theater, where I went to see films, such as Luis Bunel’s 1954 Robinson Crusoe. The Cassels building was designed by architect Agi Lindegren, the facade with its neoclassical columns inspired by the Bank of England building in London.
By coincidence, the Bank of England was founded during the lifetime of Daniel Defoe, the writer of Robinson Crusoe. Prussian-born Ernest Cassel had arrived “penniless” in Liverpool in 1869 with a penchant for mining, infrastructure and heavy industry. His portfolio soon extended to Sweden, the US, South America, South Africa, and Egypt, where he was among the financiers of the Aswan Dam. His daughter Amilia Mary Maud Cassel married Wilfrid Ashley, giving birth to Edwina in 1901, who married Lord Lois Mountbatten in 1922.
By 1957, with our transit to Canada, the metal of the moment became gold near the town of South Porcupine, Ontario. I enrolled at Golden Avenue Public School, its naming a blatant re-gilding of Yellow Brick Road. The mining buzz at the time, however, was uranium, and the wizards of ounce here were, Joseph Hirshhorn and prospector Franc Joubin. Elliot Lake had been birthed on a drafting table of an engineering firm in Toronto, triggered by a 1953 uranium discovery that built the “Uranium Capital of the World.” Forget the Cassels “theater,” this was a whole community, meticulously planned. We lived here at the peak of its boom, and then its “bust.”
The photo was taken by Sandra MacDonald of myself with a used mining drill bit in my left hand at the Granary Lake shoreline September, 1995
Franc Joubin had convinced Hirshhorn to finance a proper drilling, not just a surface test. When confirmed, they put together a secret “Backdoor Staking Bee.” Claims totalling 1,400 over 56,000 acres were made in a “Big Z” pattern, a uranium belt running through the Blind River, Elliot Lake region. The photo of myself holding the used mining drill on the Granary Lake shoreline is almost precisely in the center of that Z, the lake situated halfway between Blind River and Elliot Lake. I was on the verge here of a “staking expedition” of my own.
Just a few weeks after photo was taken, I was at the Bruno Bischofberger Gallery in Zürich, Switzerland, the first stop of 175 “meditations” on gallery spaces in Europe and North America. On September 20, 1995, I bought Peter Halley’s Collected Essays 1981-87 for twenty francs from Evelyn at the counter. I still “mine” it for information from time to time. After Paris, New York, and Toronto, the final stop of my “odyssey” was the Zero One Gallery in Los Angeles on January 23, 1997. There, I spoke with artist Kyle Lind, who unwittingly supplied a punctuation to my meditations. To my question regarding zero and one, he had said, “The space between the zero and one is the creative act.”
Steve Rockwell photo of artist Kyle Lind at the Zero One gallery in Los Angeles in 1997Steve Rockwell, It’s Not an Odyssey, 2019, acrylic on dArt International paper, 21 x 16 inches
The 1996-97 Meditations on Space book work had set the stage for a new venture. When I launched the premier edition of dArt International in January 1998, I had the advertiser support of the company, IMS (Inquiry Management Systems), also creating a “data mining” ad campaign for my fledgling dArt. Over a chopped-up and scattered copy of Artforum magazine, I laid out the fragmented sentence, “A data management company that collects, cleans, processes, distributes and exploits data on behalf of its clients.”
Steve Rockwell, inside back page ad from Premier Edition of dArt International magazine (1998). Slogan: “A data management company that collects, cleans, processes, distributes and exploits data on behalf of its clients.”
Before moving to Toronto and enrolling at Ontario College of Art in 1965, I had been editor of Urcapel, the Elliot Lake secondary School year book. On the Year Book Staff as Advertising Editor had been George Farkouh, who came to be Mayor of Elliot Lake from 1988 to 2006. After a period of impending ghost town status, he is credited with saving Elliot Lake as its uranium mines were being shut down. The town faced absolute economic collapse, the province even suggesting its abandonment. He staged, instead, a “Retired Living” Miracle, the city buying up hundreds of vacant, high-quality mining homes and turning them into “Elliot Lake Retirement Living.” This masterclass transition blueprint is still being studied globally.
Urcapel Editor, Jouko Salomaa (left), with Elliot Lake Mayor George Farkouh seated second from left
Since the early 1960s, Joseph Hirshhorn had agressively assembled one of the world’s finest collections of modern art. Much of the fortune that had made this possible came from mining ventures, especially the “big Z” uranium discoveries in the Elliot Lake region with geologist Franc Joubin. The Smithsonian Institution had long sought a national museum devoted to modern art. Its secretary S. Dillon Ripley saw Hirshhorn’s collection as a possible fulfillment. With the personal intervention of Lyndon. B. Johnson more than 6,000 of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints collected by Hirshhorn became the foundation of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
The Art of Cross-Cultural, Trans-Atlantic Friendship and the Return to Our Magical Mythological Origins, New Paltz, NY
Artists and visitors at Villa Isis. Photo Credit: Chunbum Park
At Villa Isis, a gallery in the woods that also functions as a creative retreat, Lise Ellingsen curates an exhibition of 20+ artists and film directors as a form of cultural exchange and bonding of relations. This cross-cultural event sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General New York and in collaboration with Oscar Galleri from Norway is a trans-Atlantic gesture of friendship between the Nordic countries and the United States.
Titled, Villa Isis: A Nordic-New York Immersive Art Experience, the exhibition features the works of Jens Lien, Anja Breien, Eva Davidova, Tatiana Florival, Anki King, Avani Patel, Yasmeen Abdallah, Lisa Saeboe, Shayna Strype, Eliza Lu Doyle, Kristin Jacobsen, Karine Ruud, Lise Ellingsen, Avery Syrig, and additional invited artists.
The scope of the exhibition includes works of painting, sculpture, and immersive VR and video projection, which occupy spaces out in the open amongst the foliages and within the interior of the gallery. The works all communicate with one another and inscribe experiences and new thoughts within the viewers in a complex ecosystem and web of ideas and meanings.
Anki King, “Human Nature” (2026), branches and vines over armature, 72 x 12 x 8 inches. Photo Credit: Fred Hatt
Anki King’s Human Nature is a sculptural installation made with branches and vines over armature that merges seamlessly with its natural surroundings. The work reimagines humanity’s DNA in the vegetal form requiring a magical power to transform into it. The vegetal and natural body representing a young woman is neither a prison nor a limitation; it is a type of liberation as if the person is waking up from a dream into the reality of the natural realm. The lack of arms on the figure is a part of the metaphor that captures the essence of existence for the vegetal forms existing in nature. This is just as flowers and trees lack upper appendages and digital manipulators (aka hands with fingers) and must rely purely on communication via pollens and other chemical signals. In the installation, the sculpture is lit with a red light for nighttime viewing and is surrounded by leaves and branches, the boundary to which is indistinguishable from the sculpture’s idea as the self.
Lise Ellingsen, “Auðumbla” (2023), 3D printed polylactic acid, resin, paint, polymer clay, faux snow and grass, tree and video projections and screens, archaic claw machine led and black lights, 20 x 30 x 20 feet. Photo Credit: Chunbum Park
Lise Ellingsen’s Auðumbla (2023) is an ambitious sculptural installation involving lights, resin pieces, and a TV screen that illustrate the Nordic mythology of the primeval cow who fed the primordial frost jötunn Ymir milk. It is also said that Auðumbla, which is pronounced as “eidoombla” in English, also licked and dissolved the salty rime rocks to reveal Búri, the grandfather of the gods. In the work, we see the cow extending a giant tongue to lick away at the rock, surrounded by scattered and glowing mushrooms. The digital screen displays a repeating spiral pattern perhaps to visually represent the process and the sensation of touch and taste by the gigantic corpus linguae. This work along with Anki King’s Human Nature and others positions the exhibition as a space for contemporary reinterpretation of and re-engagement with the magical and mythological origins and perception of humanity. This is the aesthetic and symbolic realm and narrative mode that had existed for tens or hundreds of thousands of human existence before the rise of science and technology in the modern era, which shattered those realms.
Kristin Jacobsen, a photographer and gallerist from Oslo, Norway, installs her signature piece titled, SMASH (2026), from the upper height of a tall tree. The installation is made from twenty A2 photographs mounted on aluminum mesh and crumpled like discarded pieces of paper. The aluminum metal furnishes the piece with a sense of permanency and longevity, which the photographs printed on paper would lack. And the photographs imbue the work with internal raw visual materials that add substance and narrative to the ideation and production process by the artist. The work is very much about the process of creativity. Why did the artist use the metaphor of the act of smushing the photographs? Jacobsen appears to reflect on the fact that the process of creativity involves steps of aesthetic and visual selection, in which additions of the ideal and the subtraction of the unideal take place. What works and what doesn’t in the final image or product? This may be a dangerous habit of artists that, when applied to the sociopolitical realm, results in evil policies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan around the time of World War II. The work serves as reversal of this habit and process of selection amongst the artists, in which the artist destroys photographs, whether her own or found, equally and without saving the favorites, as a form of expression and questioning.
Eva Davidova, “AR Dancer with Plants” (2024), augmented reality animation, dimensions variable. Photo Credit: Chunbum Park
Eva Davidova’s AR Dancer with Plants utilizes augmented reality technology on a camera-equipped camera to project a dancing figure of a vegetal humanoid onto a circular grouping of stones. The augmented reality depicts not only a dancer but also the flowers and trees standing by the dancer. Davidova’s piece gives life and agency to the natural surroundings on figurative terms to which humans can relate, serving as a bridge between the human imagination and the natural realm. The work, which is technologically-based, traverses several domains, including the human, the symbolic, the metaphorical, the natural, and the electronic machine. As a result, the installation is a reaction against our word-based thinking and preconceptions that box us into rigid thinking, preset definitions, and binaries of opposition. Davidova’s art turns out to be not just an art or a 3D rendering, but it is a creature and a vegetal life form with a life force that exists within the symbolic and aesthetic realm of not just human but also the imagination of all life in the form of atoms per posthumanist theory and pananimism.
Villa Isis: A Nordic-New York Immersive Art Experience is a thoughtfully curated exhibition in which the artists’ and curators’ visions interact and engage in a meaningful dialogue for re-imagination and re-examination of our magical and mythological roots. The shifting of boundaries of identity and narratives that cross over multiple realms between the human and nature and the machine allows us to rediscover our potential for spiritual liberation and a means of finding our place in the universe. The exchange between the American and the Nordic artists is an encounter of identities and symbolisms between a locality and a cosmopolitan hybridity (consisting of multicultural origins).
In this communication and exchange, the Nordic artists who come from a particular region and people in Europe have something to teach to the Americans, who originate from all over the world (because the US is a nation of immigrants). While the progressive arm of the US had been a pioneer of the democratic values of diversity and equality, it is now the Europeans who learned the ideological modes of the Americans and are teaching the Americans in turn about their past morally superior position of democratic values and progressive ideals. This position was prior to the rise of Trumpism and MAGA, which destroyed the American stature as the leader of the free world. While the world is greatly turbulent and changed by the rise of right-wing extremism and strongmen, the exchange across the Atlantic is an important channel for communication between the progressively-minded people. This is because we must engage in this kind of gathering and dialogue in order to reflect on our own purpose and reinvigorate our trajectory… of progress in the pursuit of human rights and dignity, equality, democratic and humanist values… for not only humanity but also Mother Earth.
I travelled with my family to Gothenburg, Sweden in 1951, leaving Espoo, Finland, which had been home to my father’s side of the family for at least four generations. My grandfather had been part of a movement to adopt Finnish names, legally shedding his Kristiansson identity for Salomaa. Steve Rockwell, on the other hand, is a creative persona. My mother had believed that Salomaa was entirely the outcome of the 1918 conflict between the Bolshevik Reds and White Finns, where Johan Nestor Kristiansson defected to the Whites. “He rammed his rifle barrel into ground at the base of a tree, and bolted,” my mother recounted.
Kuusta Rovio, the Helsinki police chief, figures into the story here. Rovio not only sheltered Vladimir Lenin in his Helsinki apartment in August of 1917, but supplied him with Russian newspapers and passed on secrets to his party comrades.
Kuusta Rovio, served as Helsinki chief of police during the 1918 revolutionary war
As it turned out, the anti-socialist White forces under Carl Gustaf Mannerheim won a decisive victory in May 1918. Rovio fled to Soviet Russia, becoming a Communist Party official. A victim of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, he was arrested in 1937 and executed the following year. Meanwhile in Helsinki, the police department bleached its Reds. The armored cruiser Sisu “Black Maria” rolled out in the year of his arrest. After the war in 1945, my father had a job painting “Black Marias” at the Helsinki Police Department. He would have been familiar with the armored Sisu since it served until 1951, the year we left for Sweden.
Armored Helsinki police car 1937
My father found employment at SKF ball bearing factory in Gothenburg, an obvious choice, as SKF parts would have regularly been shipped to the Helsinki Police Department, civilian cars being retrofitted as police cruisers. To a five-year-old, the sound of a ball bearing smacking and rolling across the floor had been memorable. Swedish engineer Sven Wingquist’s 1907 invention of the modern self-aligning ball bearing had solved shaft misalignment and machine overheating. It resulted in the foundation of Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF), paving the way for a new car company, Volvo (Latin for “I roll”).
In 1913 it had been the churning and friction of the chocolate grinder that erotically overheated Marcel Duchamp’s imagination. In Paris that year he produced the first “readymade,” Bicycle Wheel. The term described works that were selected rather than crafted, although the word did not come into use for another two years. Sven Wingquist’s self-aligning ball bearing was featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s 1934 Machine Art exhibition in New York City, not as readymade, but a “crafted” object. Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel didn’t appear at the MoMA until 1951, the original wheel not having survived. You can still find Wingquist’s ball bearing piece on display in the David Geffen Wing today.
Sven Wingquist, Self-Aligning Ball Bearing, 1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York CityMarcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City
Between 1592 and 1610, during his tenure in Padua, Galileo Galilei used ramps to study falling objects, since the high speed of a free-falling entity proved impossible to accurately time. With his “decelerated” brass balls, for instance, observations and measurements were quite feasible. Galileo found that a body fell at the approximate rate of 32 feet per second.
In the case of Vladimir Lenin’s 32 “sealed car” passengers who left Zurich railway station on April 9, 1917 for St. Petersburg, the rate of a falling body is measured in historic terms. The Germans permitted the “sealed train” to cross its territory tactically to destabilize Russia. Within months of arrival at Finland Station, the 1917 October Revolution was successfully staged, giving birth to the Soviet state. Out of the 32 passengers who essentially shaped 20th century as we came to know it, most had by the late 1930s been made enemies of the people, tortured, executed, or been worked to death in the Gulag.
Lenin on the Train, Catherine Merridale, 2017, Henry Holt & Company publishers
Lenin on the Train had been passed on to me by a couple at the Crane Beach Resort in Barbados some eight years ago. After a poolside chat about reading, I had expressed an interest in the subject. Julia then suggested I pick up the book from the lobby library where they had left it, as it had failed to hold husband David’s interest. It surprised me at the time. Learning that David had just previously been the publisher of Toronto Life Magazine, I had assumed a degree of curiosity in the topic. I now see that it had rather been my own tangled family history which had brought the pertinent immediacy to Lenin’s train ride.
Christmas 1954 we travelled back to Espoo to visit my grandmother on her death bed. Emilia Karolina Salomaa passed away shortly into the new year at the age of 91. The visit entailed a 25-mile train ride through Porkkala, a Soviet naval base. At the western Espoo checkpoint, armed Soviet soldiers boarded the train for document inspection. Heavy shutters were fastened over all carriage windows from the outside. The Finnish steam engine was uncoupled and replaced by a Soviet one, which guided the train through the military zone. Memorable to a nine-year-old was the complete darkness and strict instructions to not look outside or move about the train for the next hour. This had been my own “sealed car” passenger train experience, separated by the one by Vladimir Lenin by just 37 years.
In the dArtles column of the Winter 1999 edition of dArt magazine, I wrote, “At the preview bash of Charles Ray’s mid-career retro at MOCA in Los Angeles, Charles himself stood on the patio roof looking down over the party. He didn’t cut through the party vortex and into the show until artist and teacher Roland Brenner arrived.” From that point in my article it became a list of “who’s who” of the LA art world. Some credit for Ray’s success has to go to the Los Angeles art dealer Burnett Miller, who passed away in 2001.
In her December 13, 2001 obituary for the LA Times, Suzanne Muchnic wrote, “An energetic and insightful entrepreneur who had an eye for quality and a finger on the pulse of contemporary art, Miller is credited with introducing the work of young artists who later achieved international renown. Sculptor Charles Ray – whose travelling retrospective exhibition appeared at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998 – made a breakthrough at Miller’s gallery in 1987 with Ink Box, a giant black-lacquered metal cube filled with 200 gallons of black printer’s ink.”
Charles Ray installation view of his 1986 Ink Box at the Irvine Museum, Orange County
Muchnic quotes the Times art critic Christopher Knight, who wrote of its 1990 showing at Newport Harbor Art Museum, “The quivering meniscus of ink that is the top plane of this menacing black cube forms a threatening surface just begging to be touched, even in the face of disaster.”
In his 1995, performance at the Burnett Miller gallery, artist Skip Arnold delivers an obvious homage to Ray’s Ink Box by replacing its “quivering meniscus of ink” with his own quivering flesh. The image featured here was used in an article by Craig Stephens in the Fall 2002 edition of dArt International titled Pollock to Punk: A Conversation with Skip Arnold.
Skip Arnold, On Display, 1995, performed at Burnett Miller Gallery in Santa MonicaSteve Rockwell, Gallery Space (Shoes), 1988, acrylic, wood floor, shoes, 14 x 14 x 15 inches
My own synthesis of Ray’s Ink Box and Arnold’s 1995 On Display piece is the sculpture Shoes. It was made in 1988, a year after the Burnett Miller exhibition of Ray’s ground-breaking piece. With the Shoes, Ray’s ink and Arnold’s body evaporate, leaving the residual imprint of black shoes overlaid by black print on plexiglass. In 1997 Burnett Miller consented to be included in my Storage project. A unique feature of the gallery’s Bergamot Station building in Santa Monica was its spectacularly convenient second floor skylight, clearly visible in the top left-hand corner of the Skip Arnold photo, and neatly matched in the top right-hand of Steve Rockwell’s Storage photo.
Steve Rockwell, Storage, Burnett Miller, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, 1997, photo by Steve Rockwell
Unaware of the Charles Ray Ink Box until a couple of decades ago, I had produced the progressive “inking” of a six-by-six-inch square in 1987, the year Ray displayed his “inky box” at Burnett Miller. My square was subsequently cubed as the Shoes sculpture the following year in 1988. It took a hundred and thirty-nine people over a period of nine months to complete the “inky” square, the Pick a Number project eventually leading to the publication of dArt International magazine in 1998.
Steve Rockwell, Pick a Number between 1 and 99, 1987, ink on printed bond paper, 42.5 inches x 12 feet 10 inches
As part of the Meditations on Space project on December 1, 1995, my 36th gallery stop was Mary Boone, then in Soho. The account in the published book work read, “Someone must have been adjusting the lights or changing them. An enormous yellow step ladder rose toward the skylight in the center of the gallery. It made me think of the white ladder in Paris at Galerie Lucien Durand. Ron was busy at the desk by the door wielding a letter opener.” My black and white acrylic portrait staring up at the light suggested layered and cocooned gallery spaces from Paris, New York, and finally Los Angeles.
Steve Rockwell, Meditations on Space (Mary Boone Gallery, New York), 1996, acrylic on panel painting, 32 x 32 inches
Only more recently, having reflected on the sources of my inspiration, did it land on a “dream vision” that I had in 1970. In it, an angel appeared with a shining solidity that shattered my flesh self to the extent that I presumed it to be the “Angel of Death,” were it not for its kind radiant beauty. Absent of spiritual grounding from my family, I was open to its interpretation. In form and perfection, it exceeded anything by Raphael. To a Catholic, it could clearly have been Mary. Pairing the vision with a definition of “boon,” made it a timely benefit, blessing, or something incredibly helpful and advantageous.
