MiamiArchive
object case file
Object photograph

Magnet 7

Beach Fossil — Miami Beach, 2025

Material evidence

Pressed cement slab bearing hand-imprinted “MIAMI BEACH,” large Atlantic scallop shell, stabilized with natural salt residue and surface-layered dust.

Notes

A vertical sediment — like a barcode of tides and memory. Layers overwrite layers: a palimpsest formed by waves, heat, forgetting, and time.

Hidden — Level 11

Vertical incisions perform counting that never quite resolves into accounting. These marks are less ornament than metric — a ledger of small events: tide, footfall, pause. Made by hand, uneven and deliberate, they insist that time be legible on the object’s face. The work refuses tidy narration; instead it offers notation. Ownership here is not about possession but about inscription: to own is to carry a mark into memory. The magnet asks the viewer to translate mark into moment and, in that translation, to recognize the city as a palimpsest — vertical lines of habit, erased and retraced.

Status: available (one-of-a-kind)

Price: inquire