Last week's Chelsea Gallery Visit cont.

(Blue Lake Pass)



MAYA LIN: Three Ways of Looking at the Earth
PaceWildenstein
Maya Lin’s show at the PaceWildenstein was truly extraordinary in size and content. The gallery itself is a huge space, but her work filled the gallery space almost entirely, forcing people to walk around and through the different sculptures. The show consisted of three pieces and was titled “Maya Lin: Three Ways of Looking at the Earth,” which are selections from her environmental installations, “Systematic Landscapes.”
The first piece was a topographic sculpture made of cut 2x4s, called 2 x 4 Landscape, which she systematically placed on the floor to build what looks like a hill or a wave. This piece, although tempting, was not meant to have viewer interaction and there was a pathway around the massive work. Similar in her use of stacked wood material, her second piece Blue Lake Pass uses cut plywood sheets to topographically suggest the narrow passageways of a region of mountains in Colorado. Lin calculated these mountain passages and scaled them down into twenty units that she spaced like a grid where the viewer is able to walk through and around each unit. The final piece, Water Line, was constructed of wire and reflected a map of the ocean floor down the Mid-Atlantic ridge. This piece differed in material as well as placement in the gallery since it hung from the ceiling where viewers were able to walk underneath it. I thought that the addition of the third piece was strategic since it introduced a new medium as well as another type of landscape. It also put the viewer in the interesting position of walking underneath the represented ocean floor.
The visual aspects of Maya Lin’s large-scale sculptures were really thought out and constructed from her research of the actual environment. The topographic research behind each piece emphasized her interest and concern to express new environmental issues of the world we inhabit.



(2x4 Landscape)