Yard
11 May – 3 August 2003
www.socratessculpturepark.org
In a packed metropolis of eight million people, New Yorkers are eager to claim bits of the outdoors – whether a section of sequestered terrace or a window box – amidst the urban frenzy. The summer exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park, Yard, explores this conflation of domestic and public outdoor space that is indigenous to the city. Socrates is ideally sited in Long Island City, with a generous view of the impressive Manhattan skyline just across the East River. The site of a former landfill and dump, the park now functions as a welcoming public oasis within Long Island City’s industrial sprawl, serving as a collective backyard for the community. Taking as its title a quintessentially American icon, Yard offers provocative riffs on such customary home features as the picket fence and the backyard swimming pool, underlining the complexity of the personal domestic landscape that is made visible to the public eye.
Yard consists primarily of sculpture
(created in 2003) by 14 artists, peppered throughout the grounds. A wall of
cast resin tiles by Elise Ferguson appears to buttress a shelf of earth as
it snakes along its face. Evocative of mid-twentieth-century linoleum, the
wall employs a homey decorative language usually reserved for more private
domestic spaces such as the kitchen floor. A pair of kidney-shaped pools,
devised by the team of Lisa Hein and Bob Seng, smartly engage the park’s
waterfront location. The first, on a patch of grass close to river’s edge,
is a raised slab of concrete with a blue tile surface, a hard abstraction of
water. The second pool floats atop the river nearby and encloses within its
boundary dozens of buoyant bottles. Recalling the bottle as message bearer,
this more literal pool might allude to the furtive messages implicit in
domestic architecture.
Several of the works address the delineation of personal space. Among the
most successful sculptures is Alyson Shotz’s mirrored picket fence, which
acts as a glittery divide between brush and trees. Rather than an
impenetrable residential boundary, this reflective partition is an expansive
visual liaison with its surroundings, evoking Robert Smithson’s use of
mirrored surfaces. The compulsion behind the stereotypical manicured
suburban lot is highlighted by the sculpture of Venske and Spänle, whose
surreal front yard of pristine plastic grass and concrete sidewalk angles 30
degrees upwards; one imagines a front porch lying just beyond this odd
wedge. Scheduled for daily delivery to the grassy slope during the course of
the exhibition, The New York Times lies neatly wrapped in plastic, awaiting
its imagined homeowner – undoubtedly a different one to that conjured by
Jason Middlebrook’s nearby lawn populated by gnomes and other wacky garden
kitsch.
Adam Cvijanovic takes on the fiction of the American dream with a large-scale print depicting a bucolic home development under construction. Affixed to two perpendicular ten-foot high panels, the work seamlessly blends with the surrounding grass and sky and is positioned to momentarily obstruct the view of the cityscape across the river. The illusion is no more real than a stage set, however, as the supporting beams for each giant panel are easily visible. Similarly, Gregory Crewdson’s billboard photograph underscores the eeriness of these ever-proliferating planned communities, as the lights curiously blaze from within one unfinished house.
Kara Vander Weg