THE LAND/an art site contd.
Ted Laredo
room 2009, acrylic, canvas, wood, aluminum, lights, timer
89” x 99” x 85.5”
Featured in Equation: a balanced state? at 516 ARTS,
curated by Thomas Cates of THE LAND/an art site,
Ted Laredo’s walk-in installation, whose surfaces emit phosphorescent light, challenges our physical, relationships with light, time, and space within a built environment.
J. A. Lee of THE LAND/an art site writes, “Thinking about environmental art means remembering that art is about use and invention, and that “environment” begins outside the skin and extends infinitely. THE LAND/an art site is a movable environment, where artists may work in remote, natural or urban and designed spaces, spaces with or without walls, spaces laid out mainly in the realm of ideas, or in dialogues and exchanges among all of these sites, like the multi-venue Equation: a balanced state? (which took place for LAND/ART at urban galleries 516 ARTS and THE LAND/gallery as well as outdoors at THE LAND/an art site) ...Urban environments are also “the environment,” and land must be acknowledged as land even—or especially—when streets and structures have been built on top of it. While urban and natural environments elicit different ideas and approaches from artists, the conditions of their coexistence are at the core of twenty-first-century land-based art. Digital and other expanded media have become as much a part of the vocabulary of environmental art as stones, mud and branches… In our time it has become urgent that more, and more critical, ideas about the environment be put forward, debated, improved, supported and implemented. “The environment” is a term loaded with traps and ambiguities.... But most serious land-based art urges change, slight or grand shifts brought about by ideas.”
Miriam Sagan & E. Nuevo with invited poets
Azimuth: Writing on Walls 2009, vinyl text by Kim Arthun
Miriam Sagan and fourteen other poets created this text-based installation with wall vinyl designed by Kim Arthun. Visitors were encouraged to participate by contributing their own lines to the poem.
Link to web feature about this project: http://www.sfpoetry.org
One of the stand-out interdisciplimary projects for LAND/ART was Azimuth: Writing on Walls, led by poet Miriam Sagan and E. Nuevo. Sagan invited 15 poets to collaborate on a poem, which was then installed in the form of vinyl text by Kim Arthun on the gallery walls of THE LAND/gallery. Sagan writes, “…I focused on the four directions for four sections of poetry. As in a planetarium, these directions are both actual (the walls of the gallery) and a metaphoric closed system with each other. I set up a collaborative process with four small teams of poets. The North team was given the last line of my North section, etc. The poets added a link or stanza in turn, passing the poem by e-mail, in a lose version of the Japanese renga or renku, where all poets involved see the entire work as it evolves… Kim Arthun’s typography gave the text its own visual integrity. In this way it went from being words to being environment.”
In reflecting on the process of leading this collaborative installation, Sagan referred to the haiku master Basho, who asked, “Is it easier to link (connect) or to break away?” He said it is more difficult to link, to create the connection. “To me,” says Sagan, “all art is collaboration. The artist collaborates with materials, inherited forms, society, time and place. But this is only partially conscious. Add another person, or a whole community, and the artwork takes on an extra level of soul.”
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