Past Art Installations

Evolving Terrain
through December 1, 2016

Evolving Terrain brings together four artists’ work: Anthony Heinz May, Audrey Shachnow, Tom Monsees, and Matthias Neumann. Their work addresses the natural landscape within an ever-changing city, and hopes to create a dialogue between communities, artists, and nature, and the ways in which the natural realm supports the built environment. This exhibition is presented by the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Fort Tryon Park Trust.

Audrey Shachnow, Golden Pears
Audrey Shachnow makes large-scale sculptures with the purpose of creating beauty in everyday objects. Golden Pears highlights the connection between the importance of the earth’s natural environment and its ability to support the food we grow to sustain life. The pears invite a dialogue between the trees and the park setting, reminding us of the importance of preserving nature.

Anthony Heinz May, Persieverrance
Persieverrance is an intentionally misspelled version of the word perseverance. Containing three parts (per-sieve-errance) the word-jam sounds phonetically like perseverance, but is misspelled, reflecting to this compositional reconstruction of natural tree waste found in the park. The title suggests processes observed in the fragmented assemblage and questions relations between nature, humans, and technology. The breakdown of the recycled tree trunk into equal-sized units portrays scientific instrumentality involved in the removal of natural material from cycles that benefit all life on Earth, for human salvation and profiteering.

Matthias Neumann, bench V (basics) is a site-specific installation that continues the artist’s basicsseries, exploring an abstracted notion of form, material, space, and utility. It is based on a constructive logic of additive 2-by-4 wood studs that allow a monumentality through everyday means. The work can be experienced both as an abstract sculptural gesture and interactive spatial environment. basics encourages an uncertainty in the dialog between the viewer and the work, opening possibilities in the public quality and appropriation of the work. The temporality of the site-specific intervention is mirrored by the material and constructive logic of the work.

Tom Monsees, Tripod
Tripod is made up of three casts of a found piece of rotting wood. It is remade in ghostly matte white in reference to death masks and a homage to the object’s prior life. The wood is elevated to a place of honor generally reserved for well known, and/or well-regarded human subjects.