Andi Sutton, Assisted Flagration

DeCordova presents its inaugural outdoor exhibition. Artists have been invited to create alternative, sustainable engagements with the landscape in the Sculpture Park. By straddling the line between functionality and metaphor, these projects ultimately propose art as a prototype for better living. WORK OUT features four new commissions:
Futurefarmers present Tree University, an outdoor classroom in which deCordova’s fallen trees (originally topped during Hurricane Sandy) are used to explore all the creative possibilities that can stem from a single tree. The tree will slowly disappear, as the artists whittle and carve away its pieces into new objects (including pencils and a canoe), but its spirit will live on in these communal objects and experiences.

Fritz Haeg’s Domestic Integrities explores the ways in which local resources are harvested and brought into the domestic interior landscape of the home. As part of the project, a circular, 20-foot wide wild garden will be created in the Museum parking lot. Plants and vegetables grown in the parking lot garden will be presented inside the adjacent gallery, The Square, on on a spirally-stitched rug made of used and discarded textiles donated by people in the area.

Jane D. Marsching’s Field Station Concordia takes the form of a bird blind created from reclaimed materials in the dimensions of Henry Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, located down the road from deCordova. The structure operates as a field station for the artist for gathering data about the local ecology in the form of observations, handmade and virtual representations, and texts and maps. It gives visitors the opportunity to consider themselves citizen scientists. Check out photos from Jane D. Marsching’s WORK OUT program for April Vacation.

Andi Sutton’s Assisted Flagration features over 50 handmade, seed-spreading sculptures shaped like pink flamingos. The pink flamingo-shaped seed-sowing structures are made from biodegradable material that, with time and weather, drop seeds of endangered wildflowers, grasses, and perennials. The installation examines the issues of diversity, belonging, migration, preservation, and the future of “native” and “local” species in the face of climate change.

Collaborative workshops and outreach programs are scheduled as integral parts of each installation, as reconsidering our relationship to the environment also means reconsidering our communities and ourselves. Cick the EVENTS tab to view WORK OUT programs.

June 15-Oct 6, 2013
deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum
Lincoln, MA

Paula Hayes, Teardrop Terrarium, T027, 2006

Creating tabletop terrariums, residential gardens, immersive environments, and a 240-gallon glowing aquarium brimming with sea ­­­creatures, Paula Hayes considers herself a maker of living artworks

Art News

Quantum Parallelograph

Patrick Stevenson-Keating will be demonstrating The Quantum Parallelograph enabling participating visitors to explore their parallel identities in work that examines the scientific and philosophical ideas surrounding the theory of quantum physics and multiple universes.

The Quantum Parallelograph simulates the experience of users being able to glimpse into their “parallel lives” – to observe their alternate realities. Designer, Patrick Stevenson-Keating uses this device to explore the ways emerging technologies interface with the environment and everyday life. His Quantum Parallelograph project investigates ideas about the Multiverse and suggestions that when a photon of light appears to pass through its double slits, a connection is made across universes, and the photon interacts with its parallel version.

The Arts Catalyst
50-54 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1M 5PS
UK

Act III Opera, Humeau

For over two years, Marguerite Humeau has been on a quest at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. Although the exhibition of her works in Politique Fiction in the  Cité du Design de Saint-Etienne, France is now over it is fascinating to consider the idea and to see and hear her work.

Marguerite Humeau

A fathom is also a unit of measurement approximately six feet in length that is used to measure the depth of water, and a key reference point for the exhibition. After learning about Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 survey of Walden Pond, in which the famed polymath performed soundings to determine the lake’s depth at 102 feet and debunk a popular myth that it was bottomless, Finch received permission from the Walden Pond State Reservation to take a boat on the lake and perform that seminal survey for the second time. Dropping rope into the pond, as Thoreau had, while also employing an electronic depth meter — combining old and new technology — Finch further measured longitude and latitude as well as color-matching the water at each sounding point.

The resulting work is a 120-foot long rope – the rope Finch used in the soundings, and the artist’s description of the depth of Walden Pond. It serves as the physical record of the findings as well as an armature: paper tags for each of the approximately 700 soundings appear along the rope at their equivalent measure of depth along with their exact coordinates and a swatch of matched color, applied in watercolor. Neither entirely documentation nor sculpture, the long line may best be considered a drawing of Walden Pond.

May 2 – June 15, 2013
James Cohan Gallery
New York, NY

The festival brings together leaders in arts, science, technology, and education in a program that includes exhibitions both real and virtual, digital performances showcasing latest trends in technology, talks and conferences that present the importance of the arts in a cultural movement toward creating a future that is economically, environmentally, and socially feasible.

May 4-19, 2013
Digital Art Weeks

You have to see this bizarre video.

Huffington Post

Capacitor

Capacitor, the newest work from Grade’s studio, is being unveiled at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin on April 16. Created with perforated fabric skins stretched over mechanically fastened wood frames, the sculpture mimics the soft movement of an oceanic organism. Its cell-like components are linked to weather patterns through sensors installed on the Center’s roof. As information about wind speed and air temperature are communicated to Capacitor, temperature changes dim or brighten the lights; shifting winds contract or expand the entire sculptural form, which opens and closes like a blooming flower. Grade’s team calculated statistical means based on local weather patterns over the past one hundred years and keyed the information into a control panel. Variance from recorded wind and temperature patterns determines how bright the sculpture will glow, and the degree to which the sculpture will open. The artist states, “The whole of the sculpture will appear to be very slowly breathing.”

Capacitor’s forms are inspired by coccolithophore, a one-celled marine plant that lives in the upper layers of the ocean. These photosynthesizing organisms are environmentally significant because they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus helping to cool the planet. Each fluted shape in the sculpture represents an individual organism; each cluster communicates specific information, as a visual manifestation of the weather patterns outside the museum walls.

Grade does not simply mimic shapes, forms, and textures of the natural world, he strives to decipher its “language.” With Capacitor the response from nature is immediate – weather made manifest as a captivating and wholly enveloping environment.

Opening April 16, 2013/ On view through September 2013
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI

Organo

A few months ago, I attended the opening of a wonderful exhibition: Tania Candiani’s Cinco Variaciones de Circunstancias Fónicas y Una Pausa (Five Variations of Phonic Circumstances and a Pause). In this show, Candiani exhibits a number of diverse works, yet all of them are built using recent technology. In many cases, the technology was used as a medium to poetically and melancholically recall old but rich, machinery while also exploring sound as well as language. After the opening, I promised myself that I would go back to the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda with more time to reflect on each of the works. After a number of months, I finally had the opportunity to do so.

Pianolas

Tania Candiani is part of the Mexican National Creators System (a federal institution that provides support to outstanding national artists) as well as a fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her exhibition Five Variations of Phonic Circumstances and a Pause is wonderfully presented in a 17^th century convent in Downtown Mexico City. In 2000, the convent was converted into the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda and it is now my favorite venue for creative inquiry into technology and art in Mexico City. One of the most inspiring elements of the exhibition is the way in which she integrated the 17^th century structure and history with her work. The first piece that a visitor sees as they enter the exhibit, is an organ; a contemporary organ that is reconfigured to be able to play poetry, and may be performed (musically, as well as lyrically) by viewers, from a keyboard on an upper floor. Following it, are a series of beautiful electronic piano rolls, Pianolas which are positioned in a row, where only the last one lights up, projecting a visual representation of the musical roll on the wall. The Pianolas produce a soft digital sound, resembling that of a synthesized square wave. These works, I found a melancholic juxtaposition between the new forms and technologies with those of bygone eras.

Bordadora

Inside the next hall, in a darkened space are four white spheres. From each sphere a different 5.1 surrounding soundscape, or Historia Sonora (Sonic History) can be heard by putting your head into the sphere. These works are accompanied by a screen view of the acoustic spectrum of the speaker. Pausa (Pause) is another of the works exhibited. It elicits memories of the typewriter. In Bordadora (Embroidery), visitors are asked to speak their confessions into a microphone in one room and the confessions are translated into sewn text in another.  The work refers to the act of confession both literally and physically, where the Catholic confessor and the priest (the listener) are in separate rooms. At last is one final surprise is a work that can be heard from the campanile of the ex-convent called Campanario (The Belfry). This work produces sounds, not the expected sound of bells but rather a composition of different voices superimposed by multiple timbres and duration.

What I discovered was that the building’s sound softly colored the neighboring streets with its unique music while reinventing the impact of ancient rituals.

Needless to say, if you have the opportunity of experiencing Candiani’s work, try not to miss it.

through April 14, 2013
Laboratorio de Arte Alameda
Dr. Mora 7
Centro Historico
Mexico City, Mexico