Sites Around the City: Art and Environment

Presentation and Catalogue

The ASU Art Museum's exhibition and catalogue will present the most challenging contemporary art in the citywide project Sites Around the City: Art and Environement.  Sculpture, photography, site-specific installations (inside and outside the museum) and video installations will explore the interconnections of the built and the organic, the artificial and the natural, culture and nature - essentially the interaction between humans and the land.  The exhibition will focus on contemporary artists who are cognizant of but reject the remoteness and idealism of the earthwork artists and the didacticism of eco-artists.  Robert Smithson abhorred cities and sited his land art projects in timeless landscapes with no boundaries and with alternative measures of time and history.  These younger artists have found the same sense of the infinite and chaotic in urban and suburban landscapes, and find these environments more pertinent to contemporary experience.  Their art is more cynical, yet also more accepting, of the resulting flawed beauty and tensions between the natural and the cultivated in the urban and suburban.  They explore in their art perceptions of the landscape, patterns of behavior, and cultural and developmental impact on the land.

Catalogue will be available in the Summer of 2000.

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