Endurance: Visualizing Time
“Endurance: Visualizing Time,” curated by Sue Spaid, was organized to coincide with two indoor exhibitions: “Forever Young: Seven Decades of Art” (Spring) and “Endurance: Daring Feats of Risk, Survival and Perseverance” (Fall). The newest sculptures explore the issue of time as works endure forces, such as weather (especially wind and rain), sunlight and gravity, over time. Such forces hasten degradation/change in ways that typically defy expectation, ultimately testing each sculpture’s physical limits. A small indoor show will also feature works by these artists.
Robert Gero’s sculpture tests the willpower of wildflower seeds buried within cement covering its welded metal and wooden armature. John Kalymnios’ massive aluminum mirror, angled to reflect the sky, visibly changes as random clouds roll by. As temperatures change, the colors of vegetable oils in Stacy Levy’s hanging sculpture shift ever so slightly. Bill Schuck’s sunken Red Maple tests its improbable planting in a bunker that exposes the extensive root system teeming below the surface. A loudspeaker affixed to David Schafer’s large-scale orange frame periodically broadcasts an anonymous announcer’s tips regarding how to experience sculpture in a park such as ours.
2009 Artist in Residence: Winifred Lutz
Over 38 days, Winifred Lutz worked with assistants to create Sorting the Residue of Years made entirely by sorting the natural materials that have accumulated and decayed on an old tennis court. The installation comprises a 24-foot diameter moss circle, a 24-foot diameter debris circle, a 5.5-foot high compost earth mound and a 3-foot diameter ivy ball. Daily maintenance imposes order and protects the project from entropy. After September 2009, the piece will begin to disappear once the erosive forces at the site are no longer contained.
Lutz’s earlier work, the ever-devolving A Reclamation Garden (1992-present), is located in the park alongside Meetinghouse Road. This transient work was also created to visualize time. The extremely labor-intensive process of collecting, arranging, sorting and ordering natural materials, which environmental artists such as Ballengée, Benitez, Gero, Lutz and Schuck have done in this park, enables artists to set-up situations for which nature abruptly and unpredictably reacts against and and invites viewers to experience the past as the present and the future as the present.
artist: Bill Schuck
artist: David Shafer
artist: John Kalymnios
artist: Robert Gero
artist: Stacy Levy
artist: Winifred Lutz
