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For immediate release
Public Art Fund presents?
With works by Brian Tolle, Art Domantay, Do-Ho Suh
Peter Rostovsky, Ken Landauer, and Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz
January 29 - November 8, 2003
New York, New York (January 6, 2003) - MetroSpective, a retrospective
celebrating ten years of Public Art Fund projects at MetroTech Center,
brings contemporary public art back to the beautifully restored City Hall
Park for the first time since 1992. This exhibition, presented in Lower
Manhattan's most central public park, revisits six works that were first
exhibited as part of an innovative contemporary art program at MetroTech
Center, the busy commercial and educational hub located just over the
Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn.
Over the past decade, the Public Art Fund has commissioned more than
fifty works for MetroTech Center. Each year the Public Art Fund has invited
a new group of artists to respond to the Commons area at MetroTech, an
elegantly designed public space where local employees, residents and students
congregate or pass through as part of their daily routine-on their way
to work, neighborhood stores or the nearby subway stations. The resulting
exhibitions - always on view for a period of one year - have provided
emerging artists with an exceptional venue and a vital encounter with
the viewing public. In its ongoing effort to realize this exhibition series,
the Public Art Fund has been fortunate to partner with the developer of
MetroTech Center, Forest City Ratner Companies, who has given artists
both the financial support and the latitude to enact their vision.
This retrospective at City Hall Park provides both a new venue and new
audience for six MetroTech commissions, made by seven artists: Art Domantay,
Ken Landauer, Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Peter Rostovsky,
Do-ho Suh and Brian Tolle. Drawing upon a diverse array of subject matter
- including nature, public memorials and childhood experience - these
engaging works together offer a fresh encounter with contemporary art
that is at once playful and evocative. Furthermore, the exhibition compliments
other recent installations of contemporary art within the mayoral offices
of City Hall and the front lawn of Gracie Mansion.
Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz - 9 to 5 (1996)
Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz's 9 to 5, a sculpture installed
on two of the park's trees, features beautiful bronze pears that appear
to emerge from faucets and drop into awaiting buckets below. At once subtle
and surreal, 9 to 5 seems to tap nature at its source, magically
harvesting ripe fruit before it ever reaches the branch. This improvement
upon nature - both efficient and evocative - is an improbable twist on
the intersection of manmade technology and nature, a relationship that
has come increasingly to the forefront in the years since Martin and Muñoz
created the work. Its wry workday title furthers the artists' commentary
on the importance often placed upon streamlined productivity in our daily
lives.
Peter Rostovsky - Monument (2000)
In Peter Rostovsky's Monument, a figure stands at the edge of a
daunting precipice far above the head of the viewer, alone at the top
of a dramatically jutting mountain. It seems the stuff of fairy tales,
or perhaps of 19th-century romantic landscape paintings depicting awe-inspiring
vistas: Ninety-nine percent mountain and one percent man, Monument
appears at first glance to be a paean to rugged individualism, heroism
and epiphany. But the tiny figure, dressed in a sports coat, is altogether
ill-suited for this outdoorsy activity, as he peers gingerly from his
perch looking out on the world around him. With its generic title and
its faux-bronze appearance Monument is in fact a monument to anyone
and no one, dwelling on a state of mind instead of a person, place or
thing.
Brian Tolle - Witch Catcher (1997)
Brian Tolle's Witch Catcher is a large scale installation depicting
the architectural vestiges of a long-gone 17th-century New England home.
A brick chimney, twisting 25 feet into the air, is surrounded by the perimeter
of the house's foundation. Mysterious and monumental, Witch Catcher
suggests the archeological layering that occurs with urban development
and, perhaps, serves as a reminder of how forgetful we can be. This work,
drawn in part from Tolle's childhood memories, serves in many ways as
a prequel to his more recent and ambitious work on the Irish Hunger Memorial
(2002), located just blocks away along the Battery Park City esplanade.
Like the memorial - which simulates a rural Irish landscape by means of
a sloping grassy expanse and an abandoned cottage - Witch Catcher
combines fact, fiction and physical presence to invoke collective memory
and spark curiosity for history's neglected corners.
Art Domantay - Balsa Wood Airplane: The Land That Time Forgot
(2001)
Art Domantay's wide-ranging sculptural work has frequently involved witty
recreations of mundane objects, altered to a surreal and often-humorous
effect. 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 balsa-wood toy airplane, an object that many people played with
as a child, has an iconic design that is easily recognizable. Faithfully
rendered in every detail - from its torqued rubber band and giant metal
clip to the "pre-flight" operating instructions located below
the wings - the work prompts a re-evaluation of a familiar object. 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.
Ken Landauer - Picnic Table (1996)
Ken Landauer's Picnic Table puts an unusual spin on a familiar
park icon. From a distance, the sculpture appears to be like any other
picnic table. Upon closer viewing, it turns out to be a super-sized version
of the original, faithfully rendered with appropriately sized nuts, bolts
and long two-plank benches. The table provides a useful surface for a
coffee break or lunch, but those that take a seat may find themselves
recalling the long-forgotten childhood experience of clambering up unwieldy
objects to sit with feet dangling off the ground. Furthermore, the picnic
table is not simply larger than life. Its disarming scale - which makes
everything else around seem smaller - is exaggerated by a disproportionate
relationship between height and length, a trick of perspective that leaves
one guessing almost until last minute.
Do-Ho Suh - Maquette for Public Figures (1998, A.P.)
Do-Ho Suh, questioning the role of memorials and statues dedicated to
illustrious individuals, turns the traditional monument upside down with
his small-scale maquette for Public Figures. Instead of a single
figure perched on a pedestal, Suh creates a pedestal supported by myriad
miniature anonymous male and female figures, refocusing the viewer's attention
from the individual to the collective masses. Challenging the established
notion of the common citizen revering a monument to an important figure,
Suh emphasizes the power of the individual within public space. The Public
Figures supporting his stone pedestal, Suh says, "represent the
multiple, the diverse, the anonymous mass…supporting and resisting
the stone." Suh's work is informed by his personal experience of
making the cultural shift from Korea to the United States. Maquette for
Public Figures will be on view inside the lobby of City Hall.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Art Domantay is a New York-based artist. He has had recent solo
exhibitions at The Project in New York and The Project in Los Angeles.
His work has also been included in group shows at Andrew Kreps Gallery
and Exit Art in New York.
Ken Landauer lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York. He has
had a recent solo exhibition at AH Gallery in Los Angeles. His work has
also been included in exhibitions at Collaborative Concepts Gallery in
Beacon, New York.
Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz have had solo exhibitions
at P.P.O.W. in New York. They collaborated on Gathering, a permanent
installation of 200 bronze birds in the A/C/E Canal Street Subway Station.
Martin and Muñoz's recent photographic series "Travelers,"
an MTA Arts for Transit project, is on view at Grand Central Terminal.
Peter Rostovsky is a New York-based artist. He has had solo exhibitions
at The Project in New York, James Harris Gallery in Seattle, and Maze
in Turin, Italy. His work has also recently been included in "Casino
2001" in Belgium, and in group shows at Gio Marconi in Milan and
White Columns in New York.
Do-Ho Suh is a New York-based artist who has had recent solo exhibitions
at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris and Lehmann Maupin
Gallery. He represented South Korea in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001,
and his work has also been seen in group shows at Artist Space and P.S.
1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.
Brian Tolle is a New York-based artist whose work has recently
been featured in the "Whitney Biennial in Central Park," organized
by the Public Art Fund, "Sonsbeek 9: LocusFocus" in the Netherlands,
and "Over the Edges: The Corners of Ghent" in Belgium. The Irish
Hunger Memorial is located at Vesey Street in Battery Park City.
ABOUT PUBLIC ART FUND
The Public Art Fund is New York's leading presenter of artists' projects,
new commissions, installations, and exhibitions in public spaces. For
the past twenty-five years, the Public Art Fund has identified, coordinated,
and realized a diversity of major projects by both established and emerging
artists throughout New York City. By bringing artworks outside the traditional
context of museums and galleries, the Public Art Fund provides a unique
platform for an unparalleled public encounter with the art of our time.
The 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.
ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION
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, JPMorganChase, KeySpan, Polytechnic University, Securities
Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC) and DOITT. Special thanks to Forest
City Ratner Companies and 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.
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.
ABOUT THE CURRENT EXHIBITION AT METROTECH CENTER
Each year the Public Art Fund presents a new group of artist projects
at MetroTech Center. On view through September 2003 are Isidro Blasco's
After the End, Liz Craft's Lasso of Love, Peter Gould's
The Crooked Mile, Elke Lehmann's Black and White Tree and
Franco Mondini-Ruiz's Polvo en el Viento (Dust in the Wind). MetroTech
Center is located in Downtown Brooklyn between Jay Street and Flatbush
Avenue at Myrtle Avenue.
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Contact:
Public Art Fund
tel: (212) 980-4575
e-mail: press@publicartfund.org
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