Making in Place brings art outside
Over the past few months, we’ve watched the Schuylkill Center forest spring into life from its dormant winter form. At the same time, our newest exhibition has been growing and developing right along with it. I love watching our forest and gallery transform into art spaces, and this month, 14 artists have been on site installing their work both indoors and outdoors for our newest exhibition, Making in Place.
One of the first artworks to sprout was Oki Fukunaga’s large prismatic sculptures made with wire hangers, suspended from our trees. They float around the perimeter of our main green, standing out in beautiful contrast to the green curtain provided by the forest, transformed from their original function in the closet into astonishing visual spectacles outdoors.
Other artists’ work is growing literally rather than figuratively — Katie VanVliet and Sam Cusumano are turning data from living plants into music in real time, collaborating across species to create ethereal sound works and sculptures generated by the plants and our interactions with them.
Growing the breadth of the art disciplines we present at the Schuylkill Center, accordionist and vocalist Jane Carver has created a soundwalk experience combining field recordings of the sounds of the site as well as her own playing. Visitors can listen to this soundwalk on their own devices while walking the trails of the Schuylkill Center.
Marian (Stasiorowski) Howard has been exploring our forest through the lens of her camera, developing her photos through a polaroid emulsion technique that she’ll use to construct a translucent cube of photos in the gallery. I’m looking forward to trying to identify familiar aspects of our site in the hundreds of photographs she’ll be using. For those looking to grow their photography composition skills, she’ll be offering a workshop on photography in nature later this summer.
The nine other artists in our summer exhibition, Making in Place, explore sight, sound, soil, science, structure and more elements of what makes a place. With nine artists in the gallery, four on the trails, and a self-guided soundwalk to experience, there is a ton to see in our exhibition program this summer.
These works and more were created as part of Art in the Open, a public art program in which selected artists create their work on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Banks for three days. We are pleased to be offering these artists the opportunity to adapt their work to our spaces, continuing our partnership with this citywide program.
Art in the Open allows artists the opportunity to make their work in place, but their work in fact also contributes to making the place itself. With creative placemaking now an overused buzzword in urban development, these artists remind us of how to perceive and participate in a place, with all our senses and sensibilities at our disposal.
Please join us to meet the artists at the opening reception of Making in Place on May 24 at 6 p.m. Enjoy artist talks, light refreshments in the gallery, a guided walk to the outdoor installations and site-specific performance by Jane Carver at the reception. Making in Place will be on view through Aug. 12.
Christina Catanese directs the Schuylkill Center’s Environmental Art program, tweets @SchuylkillArt and can be reached at christina@schulkillcenter.org. For more information on the environmental art program, visit schuylkillcenter.org.