Wednesday, July 28, 2010

net



I wish we could have seen this lit up at night ... Janet Echelman's sculpture is high above the street outside Denver art museum. Since we got in late last night, and, not having a password, I couldn't post, and we have only just got the internet code (ah, the intricacies of B&Bs - but this one is spectacularly good, so look for pictures, later...) I copy shamelessly from the Denver Art Gallery site. Go visit, if you're at all within reach ...

The City of Denver asked the artist to create a monumental yet temporary work exploring the theme of the interconnectedness of the 35 nations that make up the Western Hemisphere. She drew inspiration from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's announcement that the February 2010 Chile earthquake shortened the length of the earth's day by 1.26 microseconds by slightly redistributing the earth's mass. Exploring further, Echelman drew on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) simulation of the earthquake's ensuing tsunami, using the 3-dimensional form of the tsunami's amplitude rippling across the Pacific as the basis for her sculptural form.

The temporary nature of the Biennial and its accelerated timeline precluded the artist's use of a permanent steel armature, as employed in the artist's previous monumental permanent commissions. Instead, "1.26" pioneers a tensile support matrix of Spectra® fiber, a material 15 times stronger than steel by weight. This low-impact, super-lightweight design made it possible to temporarily attach the sculpture directly to the façade of the Denver Art Museum, and this structural system opens up a new trajectory for the artist's work in urban airspace.

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 28, 2010

    For some reason, I immediately thought of Swinburne's "Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment"

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is what I tried to post before, but I think it was black on black - here, from the Denver Office of Cultural affairs (who should, indeed, have borrowed from Swinburne)...

    The City of Denver asked the artist to create a monumental yet temporary work exploring the theme of the interconnectedness of the 35 nations that make up the Western Hemisphere. She drew inspiration from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's announcement that the February 2010 Chile earthquake shortened the length of the earth's day by 1.26 microseconds by slightly redistributing the earth's mass. Exploring further, Echelman drew on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) simulation of the earthquake's ensuing tsunami, using the 3-dimensional form of the tsunami's amplitude rippling across the Pacific as the basis for her sculptural form.

    The temporary nature of the Biennial and its accelerated timeline precluded the artist's use of a permanent steel armature, as employed in the artist's previous monumental permanent commissions. Instead, "1.26" pioneers a tensile support matrix of Spectra® fiber, a material 15 times stronger than steel by weight. This low-impact, super-lightweight design made it possible to temporarily attach the sculpture directly to the façade of the Denver Art Museum, and this structural system opens up a new trajectory for the artist's work in urban airspace.

    ReplyDelete