Forest Walk proposes to document intercity at-risk streetscapes in Toronto. It also documents inviting lush, green, deep forest vistas, pathways and clearings outside the city. The images take the form of a series of banners dislocated from their original setting. The streetscape banners are installed in the forest at the Tree Museum while the forest images are installed on Bloor Street, in Toronto. […] The exchange of images and locations in the project explores urban dreams of reconnecting with nature and the vulnerability of existing forest areas. Both zones—city and country—are at-risk in a rapid-growth world economy and its related global warming.
~ Dyan Marie @ The Tree Museum
Also, Artisan Woods and another Tree Museum
As I was spending time in the town talking with people about the project, they would tell me stories about their own encounters with animals in their backyards. Many interactions seemed to occur with great regularity, but people would light up when they talked about them. The situations were common, but each story was relayed with a sense of wonder and fascination that hinted at a deeper connection. I began to realize something far more primal and mystical was happening in this town.
The stories were the driving force behind both the images and my approach to the work, but it was the crucial themes of the domestic space and the process of domestication that transformed the project. The connection to these themes became more obvious as I explored the area where these encounters were taking place. That space was often a transition zone where houses and lawns ended and the wilder, animal-inhabited area began. A space where the domestic sought connection with the wild and the wild sought the spoils of the domesticated.
~ Amy Stein @ The Rumpus
Veijo’s decision to make art from concrete, one of the most durable of materials, is obviously related to the motif of the battle against time. Of course, even concrete is not immune to the ravages of time: moss sneaks onto the shoulders of the concrete peopleand lichen decorates their faces with colourful masks. The changes are slow, almost invisible, but the photographic record enables us to observe them. While the pictures of the sculptures, taken over the years, depict the tricks that the seasons and time have played, they also illustrate the drawn out decay of the works. These images of slowly ageing works form the family album of the silent sculptures.
I visited Veijo Rönkkönen’s sculpture garden a few years ago, and it was creepy and incredible. Especially the eyeballs and teeth set into the concrete faces. And since I found this article at Books from Finland (via wood s lot), I’ll mention (again?) my two favorites: Aarto Paasilinna’s Year of the Hare, and Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll.
Studios Without Walls, a Brookline-based collaborative of sculptors, has exhibited outdoor sculpture and site-responsive installations for more than ten years. These temporary outdoor exhibitions stimulate dialogue about the interrelationship of aesthetics, environment, and the community.
As Olmsted used art — and engineering — to create a landscape of natural beauty, the artists use the interplay between art and nature to draw attention to the beauty of the locale, the aesthetic and environmental benefits of the Restoration Project, the historical importance of the Emerald Necklace, and the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted.
“I read a book once,” he says. “I read many one time. The thing about a book is that the man who is writing it brings all the lives from all the different places and makes them flow together in the same stream. As they move towards the end it’s like they have loops and holes an shapes that all fit together just nicely so that they’re just big piece really. You can look back and see how all of them got where they are. That’s the time the writer brings the book to an end and there’s no seeing past it. I’d like to meet the man who wrote a book like that so I could ask him where he got those lives. I never met anything like that in all my time. I look back and I see a big field full of mud, people and animals sliding and me sliding with them. There’s no end. There’s just times when some are standing and some are fallen.”
~ I Could Read the Sky, by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke
Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
via Thinkery
What happened to landscape painting? Its decline in status is even more surprising given the current moral, scientific, and political preoccupation with the environment. One might think that scenes of nature – central to our culture for centuries – would still have a role to play now, having done so much to cultivate our appreciation of the environment in the first place.
In a sense, however, landscape never went away: It was just transformed into something unrecognizable, and has begun to emerge again in surprising places. The rise and fall of landscape painting tells an interesting story about art’s relationship to the outside world over the last two centuries, and the ways the genre might be resurfacing today suggest just how unsettled our own relationship to nature has become.
@ Boston Globe
Thus it is no surprise that contemporary artists would adopt mutant or hybrid animals as mascots of a sort, to address a wide range of subjects, starting with man’s conflicted relationship to nature. One can’t help but be struck by the sheer range of artwork featuring such misfit organisms. From paintings that reference—and satirize—staid genres from art history to work that emulates fantastical or lowbrow tropes, young artists are employing mutant animals as unwitting spokescreatures for their own projected observations of society, nature, and the world around them: a world that has come to seem increasingly off-kilter.
@ art ltd (via Animal Inventory)