Camille and I visited the Henry Art Gallery to see the new exhibition by Maya Lin, called Systematic Landscapes. (Her most famous work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial)
Really cool stuff – 2×4 Landscape is a vast hill built of 65,000 boards set on end; Wire Landscape, a distorted grid in 3-D space replicating the exact scaled topography of the ocean floor and undersea mountain that creates Bouvet Island, which can be walked under or viewed from above. You can also walk through Landscape³, which models an actual Colorado mountain range in ¾” MDF.
The thing I dig the most about all of the work in this exhibit is the marriage of scientific precision and artistic interpretation. Oceanographers from Woods Hole helped her with the data required to produce Wire Landscape, and the other projects rely heavily on the ability to interpret hard data that is normally the exclusive province of the left-hemisphere-driven. It’s just one more proof how stunningly beautiful technology and a technical viewpoint can be.
Bonus! There’s also seventy-seven works from Roy Lichtenstein on display as well. This is another artist who fully exploited available technology in the service of art, slyly serious, wryly mocking.