One of the featured exhibits at the Corcoran right now is Maya Lin's Systematic Landscapes, a series of installations that blend...you guessed it! Systems and landscapes. It's all about exploring "how people perceive and experience the landscape in a time of heightened technological influence over our perception and environmental awareness of our place in the world" and features several large-scale installations:
Water Line, 2006
(A to-scale representation of an underwater land mass in the South Atlantic Ocean!)
Blue Lake Pass, 2006
(Modeled after a mountain ridge near Lin's home in Colorado.)
2x4 Landscape, 2006
(Made of over 50,000 fir and hemlock boards.)
Upon entering the room where 2x4 Landscape was set up, my friend and I were asked to sign waivers and wear little blue baggies over our shoes so we could walk all over it! And as I stepped gingerly across the uneven surface, a couple of young girls ignored the waiver's plea to please keep only to the mostly flat areas and started climbing the hill and tossing a bouncy ball around, giggling and squealing all the while. It was perfect. Here we were in this carefully constructed, pixelated landscape feeling as though we were strolling by kids playing on a hill in the park outside.
And what I loved most of all was this quote by Maya Lin:
"I feel that I exist on the boundaries. Somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet."
I believe we all share this appreciation of boundaries, intersections, connections, meeting points, through our art, our lives, and this blog!
(Also, just as a teaser: Remember this post? WELL! Turns out that the Corcoran is hosting an exhibit of William Eggleston's stuff (including the very photographs that Lia posted) that opens this Saturday!! So you can expect to read about that very soon!)
4 comments:
amanda, this is great. it reminds me of a lot of reading i'm doing from benjamin, sontag, and barthes about how photography as a mechanical reproduction of the world around us is increasingly mediating experience, so that the picture becomes the experience--and the proof becomes more important than the actual existence. i like maya lin's reaction to that. to do it the other way around. to present technology through the medium of landscapes.
can't wait to see these in person!!
Amanda--great post! I'm planning on visiting the Corcoran soon to check this out.
Patricia--you should check out Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture by Alison Landsberg. It touches on those ideas and discusses them in the context of American collective memory. Really interesting read. I had a class with Landsberg last semester.
oh amanda we're under the same star! i went to maya lin's "wavefield" at the storm king art center outside new york city today. it was sad because it had just been seeded so you couldn't walk on it yet (though that's the point eventually). i'm jealous of your blue baggies :)
this is so, so, so lovely and amazing! can't wait for thursday!
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