Jen Bervin's installation, The River, is a 230 ft. panoramic scale model of the Mississippi River composed of hand-sewn silver sequins. Installed on the ceiling, the model (one inch to one mile) shows the river mapped from the geocentric perspective, from inside the earth's interior looking up at the riverbed.

As one moves through the space, light shifts actively over the surface of the silver sequins like light on water. The poetics of space, real and imagined, are at play, and oddly, the space around the river appears to visually collapse.

The lower Mississippi, or meander belt, was completed during a residency at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. It took the same amount of time to sew in sequins each section of the model river that it would to walk the real one.

At the furthest wall, the piece concludes where the mouth of the river merges with the low-water areas of the delta. The delta is sewn with silver and translucent brown sequins; the shore and archipelagos are cut away, lace-like. What is land, island, water, outer gulf becomes a series of disorienting imagined reversals implicating the entire space and one's odd positon in it. Sewing on the delta is currently in progress.

The installation has not yet been exhibited in its entirety. Specs: the piece needs an 100 ft x 20 ft unencumbered ceiling with good light. For queries, please contact jenbervin (at) mac.com