The warm interior of PaceWildenstein provides a fitting space for Maya Lin’s current exhibition, “Three Ways of Looking at the Earth.” Lin offers the viewer a different perspective of the world by replicating three distinct natural forms and changing their context and material composition. Nature takes on a different form when created with man-made materials and viewed indoors.
2 x 4 Landscape, an undulating hill composed of some 50,000 cut 2X4 pieces of lumber commands the opening space of the gallery. The exhibition’s centerpiece, it embodies the show’s title by emphasizing that viewing nature in an unusual setting and medium gives an opportunity to contemplate man’s role in nature by interacting with it in a different context. For Water Line, Lin suspends aluminum wire from the ceiling to re-create dips and peaks taken from topographical maps of a specific stretch of the ocean floor. The spectator walks under the piece and is thus able to view the ocean floor from below.
Unlike Walter DeMaria’s Earth Room, which places actual soil in a gallery, Lin re-creates nature using man-made materials. Her use of 2x4's instead of tree stumps and wire instead of seaweed (for example) emphasizes the complex duality of these landscapes; although they mimic and reference nature, they still celebrate their unnatural qualities. Lin does not mask their artificiality, yet manages to create organic and fluid pieces. The viewer recognizes the artificial and organic qualities of these landscapes simultaneously and reflects on his role in the natural world.
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I feel that along with the artificial and organic dualities, Maya Lin also introduces a link to today’s digital world with her works. While looking at her pieces in a gallery setting against clinical white walls, one feels as if they are in a digital rendering or a national geography special studying the topography of the planet.
ReplyDeleteHer crafty way of 're-creating nature using man-made materials' is indeed noteworthy. By ‘changing the context and material composition of her forms’, she gives the viewer a chance to interact with nature (walk under it or see it in cross section) in an almost surreal way.
Maya Lin vigilantly balances art, architecture and technology; and brings a new dimension to the traditional sense of landscape paintings, where the viewer successfully reaches the end result of envisaging oneself in the depicted setting (much like with Whistler’s landscapes) but arrives there with a totally different approach.