WASHINGTON, DC.- The Corcoran Gallery of Art opened Washington’s first exhibition of work by the contemporary artist Elena del Rivero. The exhibition features two related installations by Del Rivero, [Swi:t] Home, 2000-2001 and [Swi:t] Home: A Chant, 2001-2006, which includes an original score, Bright Light, composed by Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris. The installations explore the passage of time and the ways that daily routine and large-scale events shape ideas about place and home.

“Elena del Rivero’s art operates on many levels. Chant is in many ways a response to September 11th. It deals with large historical and political issues, but does so from a very personal vantage-point. In this way, it’s a very timely and relevant group of works for D.C. in this moment,” said Sarah Newman, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran.

Concerned with how materials gain and transmit meaning, Del Rivero works primarily with paper. For the two projects presented at the Corcoran, the artist drew and walked on, ripped, stained, bound, embroidered, wove, spun, cleaned, mended, and archived the paper that ultimately became her finished works of art. In this way, paper became a medium through which to both register and present the effects of activity and time.

On view through September 21, [Swi:t] Home is, according to Del Rivero, “the story of a year.” She began the project in July of 2000, conceiving of it as an ongoing performance which would attempt to capture the entirety of her life during that period. Placing 20 large sheets of handmade paper throughout her home and studio in lower Manhattan, Del Rivero marked them with the traces of her daily existence—walking, eating, washing, and working. At the end of six months, she gathered the trampled sheets and transformed them over the second half of the year. They became the basis of [Swi:t] Home, where they hang amongst drawings, maps, books, and sculpture. Using the phonetic spelling in the first word of the title, Del Rivero’s piece evokes both “suite,” as in a series of works, but also “sweet,” with all its associations of the memories and comforts of home.

In one sense, the second installation, [Swi:t] Home: A Chant, grew from the concerns of the earlier work; in another, it is the product of pure chance and outside intervention. When the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001, Del Rivero’s living and working space—located just across the street from the towers—was also a casualty. Returning home to find her windows blown out and every surface covered with ash and debris, the artist began the process of making sense of an event that had, in an instant, supplanted the memories made and recorded there during the previous year.

Over the next five years, Del Rivero painstakingly collected, catalogued and, ultimately stitched together the legal briefs, take-out menus, and personal letters that she found in her apartment. The result is a monumental curtain of sewn paper, more than 500 feet long, which will be installed in the Corcoran’s rotunda through November 16. As a product of tragedy and countless hours of private labor, Chant is both mournful and reparative. It is a deeply personal take on the events of September 11th.

[Swi:t] Home: A Chant received the support of the Creative Capital Foundation.

“The materials, as well as the form and ideas behind the work, came directly from the events of September 11th. But I felt it was important to show how Chant also came out of the artistic concerns Del Rivero has been developing for decades,” Newman said. “The two works together represent a kind of ‘before and after.’”

Both of Del Rivero’s installations deal with the passage of time and the connections between lived experience, memory and the creative process. As intimate responses to public events, they blur the line between art and life.

Born in Valencia, Spain, Del Rivero works primarily in paper. She has lived in New York since 1991, gaining U.S. citizenship in 2003. She has earned degrees from the University of Valencia and Cambridge University. Her work is in the collections of the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain (IVAM); The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Yale University; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard; and the Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofia; Madrid, among other institutions. Del Rivero has also been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including two grants from Creative Capital (2003, 2001), two NYFA grants (2002, 2001) and two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2002, 1991). She won the Prix de Rome in 1988 and was awarded a residential fellowship at the Bellagio Center in Italy by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2005.