NEAR WATER//Melanie Clemmons
True crime communities flourish online, where strangers convene to moonlight as armchair detectives, proposing theories, discussing timelines, pouring over photo/video/audio evidence, and sleuthing through publicly available records. The desire to solve open investigations is paralleled by the impulse to learn as much as possible about them and often, the only information that is off limits to these internet investigators, is the experience of places themselves; the Ramsey basement, the Best Buy parking lot, the McCann holiday apartment. And in this field dictated by rationality and objectivity, psychic detectives are largely dismissed as resources due to their stigmatization as charlatans. Despite this skepticism, psychic detectives’ unconventional methods for divining information have had success in helping to solve cases.
In Near Water, Clemmons has adapted the established divination tool of a pendulum and have utilized real terrain data to re-create the Hudson Pecan Orchard in the Tara Grinstead case. Users are invited to wield the pendulum and traverse the space in an effort to meditate on her disappearance.