Stephen Lichty: Ghost Stone centers on quartz sourced from Liberty Hill Diggings — a defunct Gold Rush-era mine in the Sierra Nevada's western foothills, where 19th-century hydraulic mining caused severe environmental devastation before being banned. The mine's boulders, only accessible because of that destructive extraction, now anchor a site-specific three-work exhibition that holds the Sierra Nevada's antagonistic contradictions in tension: scarred extraction site and protected National Forest, environmental ruin and pristine natural beauty. Lichty's decade-long engagement with this material traces the fraught origins of what he found.
