On entering the USM Art Gallery to experience Stephanie Garon’s “under/current” installation, a visitor’s immediate impression of the exhibit is that it appears similar to typical Maine rocky beach scenes, except without actual water. After looking more closely, what initially appears to be a collection of pebbles and small rocks (as seen on hundreds of Maine’s rocky beaches), is actually thousands of gray cylindrical stone pieces. Some are lighter colored, some are darker. Most of the cylinders are 6 to 12 inches long and about 2 inches in diameter. The sides of each cylinder are smooth, while the ends appear sharper.

A gallery visitor can experience the installation on several levels at the same time, as Garon has presented various combinations of environmental messages and artistic expressions. These areas include: historical mining in Maine, Maine geology, coastal ecology, the psychology behind “gold rushes,” the past and present exploitation of Native American land resources, 19th Century industrial technology, and current attempts to make amends for past environmental damage and exploitation of indigenous lands.

Beyond the overt themes, the direct experience of seeing the re-created coastal scenes and simulated beaches offers an opportunity for quiet reflection, meditation, and a deeper level of understanding.

The story behind the creation of “under/current” is just as interesting as the installation itself. It all began when an environmental organization known as “The Greenhorns” of Pembroke, Washington County, Maine requested artists to submit proposals for utilizing a very large trove of 19th century rock core samples. Weighing altogether over twelve tons, the pieces (numbering in the thousands) had recently been discovered in the musty basement of a deteriorating farmhouse on one of its properties.

It was learned that the rock samples were drilled between 1850 and 1900, when a kind of “Gold Rush fever” spread across the continent, following gold discoveries in California, Alaska, and Yukon, as well as silver discoveries in Colorado. This drilling and digging “fever” even spread all the way to the Downeast coast of Maine, near Eastport, where some quantities of valuable minerals were found. Eventually two mines were opened elsewhere in Pembroke, but the exact location on the shore of Cobscook Bay where these samples were extracted was never found to be worth mining.