BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.- Cranbrook Art Museum opened the new exhibition Daniel Arsham, The Source: A Catalog of Late-20th-Century American Relics, a fictional archaeology of the future through the creation of iconic objects and products of late-twentieth-century American life. The exhibition opened at Cranbrook Art Museum on Friday, March 1, and runs through June 23, 2019.

Arsham is a New York-based artist who works across the fields of art, architecture, film, and performance. He is also co-founder of Snarkitecture, a collaborative practice known for using everyday materials in unexpected ways to create captivating public installations. Their well-known participatory project, The Beach Detroit, opened to the public in the Campus Martius area of downtown Detroit on March 1, the same day the exhibition opened at Cranbrook Art Museum. The Beach Detroit consists of an ocean of more than one million recyclable, antimicrobial plastic balls, that visitors are encouraged to explore and "swim" in.

Devoid of their natural coloration and in a seemingly petrified state, the objects in the exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum are newly produced works that are exhibited as relics from the not-too-distant past—the unearthed remains, perhaps, of some unknown cataclysmic event.

The works are eroded casts that are expertly fashioned from materials such as sand, selenite crystal, or volcanic ash. The choice of objects for this presentation—from the worlds of sports and music—resonate with the artist’s early life, “all of these things influenced me, particularly as a child, and many of my peers,” Arsham said.

For the first time, such objects are being displayed as archaeological artifacts inside the gallery, heightening the illusion of veracity and sense of authenticity. Cranbrook Art Museum is also displaying his "Falling Clock," which is inspired by the idea of an object’s gravitational force bending space and time.

Daniel Arsham is a New York-based artist who works across the fields of art, architecture, film, and performance. His work has been presented at High Museum of Art, Atlanta; MoMA PS1, New York; and The New Museum, New York, among others; and is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2008, along with Alex Mustonen, Arsham co-founded Snarkitecture.