JESSICA MENSCH

THE GROTTO

The Grotto (video documentation) 2025, 14’ x 8’ x 10’, painting, video projection, sound, and kinetic sculpture

The Grotto is an immersive installation built out of layers of painting, video projection, sound, and kinetic sculpture. 

The work revisits the historical form of a ‘Garden Cave’, an architectural landscape feature that became popular among European aristocracy and an ascendant merchant class between the 16th and 18th centuries. Often built into gardens or palazzos, these ornamental structures took the idealized form of a cave and were filled by their owners with ‘ancient style’ statues – often of gods and nymphs, as well as automata, fountains and imported precious objects such as coral and shells. Part reliquary and part treasure horde, ‘Garden Caves’ were intended as fantastical sites where time was suspended at the entrance, allowing the interior to become a space for reflection and connection. But these immersive fantasies were a product of acquisitions (both the mythological statues and newer objects from ‘elsewhere’ such as shells), guided by a sense of entitlement and  ‘anemoia’ – nostalgia for an imagined past. The Grotto communes with this old-world divertimento but snaps the strings that suspend its fantasy. 

The work starts with a painting - a 13’-1/2’ x 8’ depiction of a cave (grotto) - which serves as a stage for video projections of figures, birds, running water, a marionette, deities, ships and shells. Facing this painting/projection is a small electronic water wheel which circulates paper boats and wax shells which are in turn projected onto the lower portion of the painting, folding the physical sculpture back into the illusionistic space of the stage.

Movement returns. Figures of women lie across the forms of the cave and tremor faintly with languid body movements - a hand scrolling on a smartphone or turning the pages of a book. Streams periodically trickle karstically across the rocks. Time returns as atmospherically shifting colours remind the viewer of the sun's passage throughout the day. Objects pop forward and withdraw into alcoves, like a bird in a cuckoo clock when it strikes the hour. 

And this Grotto meets the ground - a limitless expanse of water created by an actual, physical water column, spinning counterclockwise and filled with all those objects ‘from elsewhere’ - shells, corals, all now here, together with the boats that brought them - and all agitating as an engine of time that propels the eternity of a cave into the present.

*This text was written by me, with exuberant edits, suggestions and words by my friend Asad K Raza.