Sites Around the City: Art and Environment
Exhibition Artisits
Su-Chen
Hung's and Diana Thater's video installations explore cultural perceptions
of the land and nature. Roxy Paine painstakingly recreates natural elements,
such as a field of mushrooms from lacquered plastics. A metaphor
for the new cities, the mushrooms are attached to the gallery floor, divorced
from their natural environments, stripped of their magical properties
yet whimsical survivors in even the most inhospitable locations. Kim Abeles
collects layers of smog on screens that mimic familiar, romantic Hudson
River School landscape paintings.
During the ASU Art Museum's exhibition, her smog paintings will hang side
by side with the original works from the Museum's historic American collection,
questioning our perceptions of the American land still influenced by nineteenth-century
thought. Michael Ashkin creates tabletop dioramas of the edges of cities,
of sublime industrial wastelands. Catherine Opie photographs strip malls,
suburban facades and freeway structures that multiply in Western cities
and have become our identifiable monuments. Todd Hido captures atmospheric,
nighttime slices of suburban architecture.
On closer examination these original California suburbs are deteriorating,
experiencing the same entropy that Smithson found in the Great Salt Lake.
Stephanie Brooks mimics the need to mediate the experience of nature with
signage. Her Feel Good Here was a witty pop-psychology rendition
of the exercise park. She will create a signage system on the ASU
Campus drawing upon the history of the area and the patterns of behavior
of the current population. Finally, Laurie Lundquist uses her knowledge
of botany and landscape architecture to create artworks that actually
restore the environment. Working at the Exploratorium in San Francisco,
she developed an elaborate installation to repair the Lagoon. She
will create a site-specific installation of an algae garden in the interior
courtyard of the Museum's Antoine Predock designed building.
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