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STUDIO in the Park
Artists
Puzzlejuice
rock climbing rope, paint
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Each piece of PUZZLEJUICE has been hand crocheted out of nylon rope, typically used by rock climbers, and painted in brightly colored patterns. Every section was created in the artist's studio and then transported to this site, where the artist spontaneously arranged and composed the piece like a three dimensional collage. This unique process transforms knitting's intimate aesthetic into a large-scale public sculpture while still maintaining the impulsive element of invention. The animated shapes, seemingly plopped on the ground like an unfinished puzzle, are casually layered and overlapped to create an imaginary terrain that is in obvious contrast to its surroundings. The work weaves in and out of meanings, triggering chains of associations and ideas. It challenges us to make sense of various elements and puzzling combinations brought together in our environment while looking in a direction we often miss, down, toward the ground on which we stand.
Orly Genger has recently exhibited at The Aldrich Contemporary
Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Haifa Second International Installation
Triennale, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel.
Project Sponsored by Linda and Bob Foran
Life in the Hudson: Ancient Aquatic
driftwood, line, lights
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Driftwood's strange and diverse natural shapes are weathered by time, tide, sun and current. The textures, colors and patinas vary greatly. From this wood Greenberg creates kinetic mobile sculptures that become nature representing nature. The material that is used in these pieces has drifted from some part of the 315 miles of Hudson River that extends from its source in the Adirondacks down to New York Harbor and out to the Atlantic ocean. Thousands of varieties of trees and plant life compose this timeless matter. The material for these sculptures was collected from the rocks banking Riverside Park between 95th and 125th Streets. Some pieces individually appear to have been sculpted by nature into bizarre, primitive-looking extinct creatures. Greenberg is inspired by the infinite whimsical combinations that can form sculptures, both abstract and representative. Floating is the most important aspect of the sculptures, representing drifting in water and then in the air, both which he sees as natural theatrical events. Breezes will animate them and sunlight will cast deep motion-filled shadows like those they once possessed when they were live growth on the banks of the Hudson.
Robert S. Greenberg, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, has had recent exhibitions at CWOS, Artspace , New Haven, CT and the Java Gallery, Sun Valley, ID.
Untitled (The Grates)
steel, pink electrical wire
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Elana Herzog's piece is made of pink wire, which is twisted and knotted to form a shallow relief on the surface of the railroad grates that are located in this grassy median. The textured relief may bring to mind flowers sprouting through the metal grates, shag carpet or artificial turf. It is arranged to resemble the image of the train tracks below and draws our attention to the long underground tunnel beneath our feet. The work makes a connection between the vibrant plant life of the park and the massive industrial substructure of the city with which it shares its home.
Herzog's piece can be approached from any point along the Promenade, and viewed from every available vantage point. Although the work covers considerable distance, it can never be seen in its entirety, but relies on memory and duration to complete itself. We can look forward to seeing the materials of the piece transformed by the elements during the coming months, as the pink wire gradually fades in the sunlight and the steel turns orange from rust.
Herzog has had recent exhibitions at the Usdan Gallery, Bennington, VT, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY and an upcoming show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
North Overlook, Hudson River
8,000 hollow plastic balls
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North Overlook, Hudson River is composed of 8,000 hollow plastic balls that are floating in clumpy formations in the Hudson River. McKendree Key uses manufactured products like the plastic balls to transform natural and domestic environments. All of her work is site-specific and sometimes invites interaction from the viewer. Other works have included floating 7,500 pink balls one mile down a river and scattering 4,000 white balls on the frozen surface of Lake Champlain in Vermont. Many of Key's pieces are created in or about water, and all of them have a life and a death and do not physically exist after their time is up. Nature often plays a role in the way the pieces are realized and how long they will last.
McKendree Key has recently exhibited her work at The Sculpture Center and at the South Street Seaport with a project sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Silver Tunnel
silver foil, light
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Mischa Kuball is a German installation artist best known for activating spaces with light. His interest in this project lies in the experience of walking in a public park inside the urban structure of a city and the contrast of blossoming trees, expansive sky and verdant grass with the hustle and bustle of the park's periphery, traffic noises and grittier spaces. Underpasses can be eerie and forgotten sites, and SilverTunnel will introduce strong bright light and reflective crinkled silver foil to create a new impression. When a painter finishes his or her work, the painting is the product and there is something to look at; when Kuball finishes his work, it's done so it will disappear. It doesn't continue to be there visually but leaves an imprint and a grammatical memory .
Private Light Public Light, 24th Sao Paulo Biennial 1998
and Mirroring Evil, Jewish Museum NY, 2002 are among the many exhibitions
in which he has participated.
Silver Foil generously donated by Commodity Foil and Paper.
On, Under and Between
concrete, silica fume, cement
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Emil Lukas' work deals with the unconventional viewing of painting and sculpture, and this piece continues his experiments with process, memory and evidence. According to Lukas, everything comes in waves and is often revealed in layers. On, Under and Between is made by sequentially casting layers of cement one on top of the next. Often more important than the thick layers are the almost invisible events that happen between each layer. These events are minute glimpses of evidence that reveal a sprawling network of processes that link, bond, contextualize and inform the next event. This sculpture has hollow pockets where found objects from the Park were once embedded. These spaces are like words not written that exist between the lines. Ultimately the final layer is one of potential, as the viewer is welcome to place paper between pencil and the sculpture and lift rubbing from the surface detail to take home as a memory. Lukas sees these drawings as ghosts or memories that are made from interaction.
Emil Lukas has recently exhibited at the Weatherspoon Gallery in Greensboro, NC, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburg, PA and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT.
The Fall
oil, silicone and solvent-based ink on vinyl on wooden structure
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Fabian Marcaccio is an artist based in New York who uses contemporary and traditional techniques to redefine painting in the age of digitalization. He does so extending painting through time and space. He uses multiple sites and micro and macro images and amplifies synthetic materials to engage the viewer. The Fall is a 16-foot high by 90-foot long piece specifically designed to work with this Riverside tunnel. The piece produces a vertical, waterfall-like effect that follows and surrounds the trajectory of the viewer-passerby. The viewer is simultaneously exposed to an infinity of chaos and order, a concrete and abstract environmental painting experience.
Fabian Marcaccio has had recent exhibitions at MALBA,
Buenos Aires, Argentina and The Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL.
Project Sponsored by Julie and Edward Minskoff
Hudson River
digital print, plexiglas, wood
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The site of this painting is looking northwest from the Manhattan side of the Hudson River toward the New Jersey Palisades, during the late Pleistocene era. The Pleistocene lasted from 1.6 million years ago to around 10,000 years B.C. This image is set approximately 15,000 years ago, when the water level was 120 meters below its present level. The glacier is receding, leaving the deep trench that became the Hudson River that you are familiar with. Alexis Rockman is a painter living and working in New York City. Over his twenty-year career, he has collaborated with people from a variety of disciplines, such as science and architecture, and has exhibited in solo and group shows around the world. A native New Yorker who frequented the American Museum of Natural History as a boy, Rockman is inspired by the iconography of natural history as well as murals and dioramas. His work explores the intersection of humanity and nature, science and art, documentary and fantasy. Alexis
Rockman has recently had exhibitions at the Brooklyn
Museum of Art and the Camden Arts Center, London, UK.
Project Sponsored by Brady, Casey and Bumpy
Faces in Places
foam, polyurethane, paint, resin
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These faces, originally exhibited in smaller canvas format at a gallery in Miami, were among a potpourri of 123 goofy, grinning, brightly-colored images. For this project, Scharf selected three of them, turned them into 3-dimensional sculptures of foam and urethane and installed them on two sides of a fence so that they could smile, wink and glow at the oncoming traffic of the Henry Hudson Parkway and, at the same time, snicker and grin at the adults and children playing on the other side of the fence at Hudson Beach. Faces In Places stems from Scharf's obsession with faces; he finds them everywhere, both animate and inanimate ones. He takes advantage of all opportunities to startle and delight his viewer. He loves the surprise of an emotional reaction in an ordinary setting or experience. Imagine driving on the highway and getting a silly, shiny smirk that brightens up the otherwise mundane moment.
Kenny Scharf recently exhibited his work at the Pasadena
Museum of California Art; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and
The Downtown Show, Grey Art Gallery, NYU.
Project Sponsored by Coco Consciousness Company Institute.
Wishing Field
digital print on mesh
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With acute insight into subjects that address various stereotypes in history, race and pop culture, Simmons makes extraordinary works with simple materials. He is best known for his expansive erasure drawings, which are executed in white chalk on slate-painted walls. In Wishing Field, Simmons' interest lies in baseball fields, basketball courts, and other public spaces for pick up games that represent those spaces where players live out their dreams and desires, and in the ball field as a place to make and recapture memories. As players perform and interact with the space, memories are constructed; and when the field is empty of its players, viewers are left to reflections of the past. There is often a certain allusiveness and ambiguity to Simmons' works that ends up raising more questions than it answers.
Gary Simmons has recently exhibited his work at the Bohen Foundation in New York City; and The Studio Museum of Harlem.
Messenger
high-gloss black latex pain, names, prayer
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Road tattoo? If roads are considered the skin of a community, then a road is to the public body what skin is to the private body. If people mark their skin as a means of commemoration, communication or ritual, then a road can be marked for the same reasons. Placed at locations of community significance, road tattoos are composed of cultural designs previously appropriated to mark skin. This road tattoo is a tribute to bicycle messengers in New York City. With an abundance of tunnels and bridges, entrances and exits, bad traffic and bad drivers, this is a tough place to be a bicycle messenger. Stories of famous messengers, as heroes, have filled history books and literature. Based on Celtic knotwork, Messenger is located on a peaceful road free of city traffic. Once the design is drawn on the road, names of New York City bicycle messengers are painted within the design, a prayer is said and the design is painted in, covering names. Subtle and close in color to the roadway, Messenger is made with hi-gloss black latex paint causing it to appear and disappear with passing light. Eventually traffic and weather conditions dissolve it into the road.
Steed Taylor has recently exhibited his work at The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and Florida State University, Tallahasee, FL
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