CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Rose Salane (b 1992, Queens, New York) studies significant social and cultural moments—events that alter how we see the world and whose impact transcends generations and demographics. Uncovering the intimate and personal stories that are often lost in the larger historical narrative, Salane assembles objects, images, and text, as a means to magnify the details associated with these historic turns. For her first solo institutional exhibition, Salane continues a line of inquiry into New York's former World Trade Center that chronicles the building as a hub of social activity, a community of workers, and a lens through which to view broader culture.

List Projects: Rose Salane features a series of framed works and a large scale sculpture that engage the lost collection of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey’s (PANYNJ) library, once located on the 55th floor of the former World Trade Center. Unknown to many, the library served the workers of the Port Authority and was open to the general public until closing due to budget cuts in 1995. In April of 2001, a record of its inventory was copied onto six floppy disks and and sent to six different libraries in New York and New Jersey in the hopes of preserving the collection. In preparation for their distribution, the library’s holdings were being stored in sub-basement level 4 of Tower 1 and were destroyed in the September 11 attacks. In 2018, Salane became acquainted with Carol Paszamant, a former librarian at the New Jersey Department of Transportation who received one of the six original floppy disks. Paszamant shared the archive in its entirety with the artist and has provided much insight into the Port Authority meetings that determined its fate.

In this exhibition, Salane incorporates publications pulled from the inventory of 23,192 items into the work on view, assembling an incomplete facsimile of its contents onto a customized shelving unit. Her selections aim to capture the ethos of a unique junction in history between the Cold War period and the onset of the information age. In doing so, Salane frames a conversation around the relationship between the past and an unsettling future, the shelf life of technology and assumed stability of the archive, and how memory functions within and beyond institutional systems.

List Projects: Rose Salane is organized by Yuri Stone, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Rose Salane (b 1992, Queens, New York) has recently exhibited at Company Gallery, NY; Carlos/Ishikawa, London, UK; Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland; and Swiss Institute, Rome, Italy. Salane attended the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY and is currently enrolled at the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College of New York, CUNY. List Projects: Rose Salane is her first solo exhibition at an institution.