A collaboration between Sage Dawson and Meghan Grubb, Stopgap is a site-responsive sandbag shelter for one, printed with silver chain-link and barbed wire fence patterns. The work is set within the In/Out Space at Granite City Art and Design District, and based upon the adjacent fence surrounding the US Steel Corporation. Other nearby barriers, both natural and man-made, also serve as critical points of origin for the collaboration.
Stopgap deliberately conflates permeable and impermeable boundaries, and doing so examines what it means to build walls for self-preservation. The work considers labor inherent in wall-building efforts, and observes fear, vulnerability, and the human impulse to exercise control over and within major flood events. Stopgap is a study of both personal and collective isolationism; the temporality, efficacy, and futility of barriers; and the urgency of border issues today.
