Press Release
Artist Bio
Sponsorship
Location
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laminated balsa wood, plastic, rubber bands and aluminum

MetroSpective

January 29 - November 8, 2003

City Hall Park

Public Art Fund and Forest City Ratner Companies is pleased to present an exhibition that brings contemporary art back to City Hall Park for the first time since 1992. MetroSpective celebrates ten years of Public Art Fund projects at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, revisiting six works that were first exhibited there. The retrospective at City Hall Park provides a new venue and audience for these seven artists: Art Domantay, Ken Landauer, Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Peter Rostovsky, Do-Ho Suh, and Brian Tolle.

In Balsa Wood Airplane: The Land That Time Forgot, Domantay has taken the familiar toy balsa-wood airplane and augmented it in scale from a tiny 12 inches to a giant proportion of 15 feet in length. The original iconic design of a balsa-wood toy airplane, a recognizable childhood object, has been faithfully rendered in every detail - from its torqued rubber band and giant metal clip to the "pre-flight" operating instructions located below the wings. Both the smallest child and the most sophisticated adult can relate to this toy's simple mechanism and its reference to the dream of flight.

Artist Bio
Art Domantay is a New York-based artist whose wide-ranging sculptural work has often involved witty recreations of mundane objects, altered to a surreal and often-humorous effect. He notes that when we see an ordinary object or situation in an altered state or out of context, we pay attention to how we function in our routine lives. He says, "When we see something familiar and recognize the function it has in our everyday life, it then becomes forgotten because many times familiarity equals insensitivity…[my works] intentionally try to break that familiarity [and] walk that thin thread between make-believe and reality."

Sponsorship
This exhibition and the ongoing Public Art Fund program at MetroTech Center are sponsored by the MetroTech Commons Associates, an organization that consists of MetroTech companies Bear Stearns & Company, Forest City Ratner Companies, KeySpan, JPMorganChase, Polytechnic University, Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), DOITT and E-911. Special thanks to First New York Management.

This exhibition is made possible through the cooperation of the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York and City of New York / Parks & Recreation, The Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor, and The Honorable Adrian Benepe, Commissioner, and William Castro, Manhattan Borough Commissioner, City of New York /Parks & Recreation.

Public Art Fund is a non-profit arts organization supported by generous gifts from individuals, foundations, and corporations, and with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs.

Location
City Hall Park is bordered by Chambers Street, Broadway, Centre Street, and Park Row.
The nearest subway stations are A, C, E to Chambers Street; 4, 5, 6 to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N, R to City Hall; 2,3 to Park Place.