Artists plant new ideas about nature

Art is busting out all over in placid Pasadena, courtesy of the city's Tender Land festival.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

November 9 2004

In a Pasadena art gallery, robotically plunked glockenspiel keys quietly gurgle postmodern melodies programmed by data maps of the 1999 Hector Mine earthquake. Six miles east on the Caltech campus, a trailer, dubbed by artist Michael McMillen as "Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Field Laboratory," houses a faux sci-fi gizmo relaying what appears to be grainy footage from dirt-cams tunneling through the bowels of the Earth. At the One Colorado shopping mall, Berkeley artist Mark Brest van Kempen has created a fern sculpture that recycles water through boxes of oyster mushrooms.

Art is busting out all over in placid Pasadena, courtesy of the city's Tender Land festival. Named after Aaron Copland's 1954 opera, Tender Land is hosted by a consortium of 14 "producing partners" and runs through January.

Stephen Nowlin, director for Art Center College of Design's Williamson Gallery and one of the festival's organizers, says, "We specifically chose the title to imply a kind of fragility to nature. There is this implicit sense that the environment needs responsible stewardship. But other than that, we didn't have any sort of curatorial oversight into what each of the various programs would do with the theme."

The results are wildly eclectic — Pacific Asia Museum's collection of 16th century landscape paintings fit the bill, as do the century-old black-and-white photographs displayed at Pasadena Museum of California Art. But an especially intriguing motif, rooted in Pasadena's reputation as a haven for Noble-prize winning research at Caltech and elsewhere, explores the interplay between nature, science and art, which Nowlin feels has become increasingly attractive among creative types. "There's a number of artists and institutions around the world that are focusing on the interface between art and science," he says. One prime example: the earthquake xylophone at the Williamson Gallery. The "(ear)th" sound sculpture came about when Nowlin commissioned artist Steve Roden to invent a new instrument. Roden worked with Art Center College of Design professor AnnMarie Polsenberg, who devised a system of tiny motors capable of translating Caltech geophysicist Mark Simons' color-coded seismic activity maps — interferograms — into instructions that activate toy xylophone keys perched atop the instrument's plywood shell.

"Artists are always drawn to the nexus of change that comes from new intellectual ideas, and the most provocative ideas in society today are being forged in scientific community," Nowlin says. "It seems like a natural time for artists and scientists to collaborate."

Nature preserved

In the case of Stacy Levy, artist and scientist are one and the same. Her installation at the Armory Center for the Arts, "Suburban Oldfield: Diagram of a Vacant Lot," is a life-size celebration of weeds crafted from recycled industrial bits appended to thousands of slender steel rods.

Levy, speaking from her home in rural Pennsylvania, says: "I wanted to make even the most scraggly part of nature look beautiful. Once people know there's 13 different species in a vacant lot, the next time one gets paved over they won't be thinking, 'Well, there wasn't really that much nature there, what's it matter?' "

An art major at Yale University, Levy minored in forestry and earned her living after school working as a landscape architect. "This idea of controlling the sequence of growth was really interesting, so my work started to be more about natural processes," she says.

The "Suburban Oldfield" piece is culled from a 13,000-piece installation that Levy planted on the parking lot at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art after coming across "Natural History of Vacant Lots," an ecological treatise by Matthew Vessel and Herbert Wong, published by University of California Press in 1987. "First of all, the book reminds you that nature's everywhere," Levy notes. "It's about this very diverse ecology that takes placein the city and how it comes to be."

Inspired by the book and her mentors, veteran environmental artists Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Levy decided to apply her botanical expertise to the creation of an industrial-strength vacant lot sculpture. "I realized I really wanted to deal with the question of, 'If the museum wasn't here, what would be?' And then my forestry background kicked in."

To top off the 1/16-inch-thick copper-coated welding rods she used as stems, Levy foragedfor potential "seedheads" at junkyards and salvage outlets, purchasing Ping-Pong-ball-like spheres in "low fat" (translucent) and "high fat" (opaque) varieties; punch-out leather discs; blue cellophane wafers left over from a stoplight manufacturing process; copper wiring; and black rubber stoppers used in scientific labs. "These throwaway things have a sort of industrial repetition quality, which works for the piece because these plants have that quality too when you see field after field of them."

The mostly non-organic materials also serve as an apt metaphor in the way they mimic invasive plants' exceptionally hardy character.

"When you try to pull these plants out of the ground, you'd almost think they're made out of steel fiber, they're so tough," Levy says. "They can withstand trampling and drought, and having garbage or gasoline fumes blown into them all day doesn't seem to bother them that much."

Feeling, not seeing

Adapting the Oldfield installation to match the Southern California ecosystem called for major revisions. Earlier this fall, while setting up her vacant lot at the Armory gallery, Levy stayed in La Crescenta for a week and started making field recordings early each morning in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. "I made this soundtrack of birds and cars and occasionally hearing kids and doors banging. I'd already "planted" at the Armory the first day I got here, but once I started spending time in the fields in these marginal areas and just noticing how things were growing, I tore it all out and started again."

Levy continues, "It's so wet on the East Coast that you get rampant growth. I had to go in there with bolt cutters and cut thousands and thousands of 3-foot-long stems back to 18 inches and below. It's a much shorter show now. You'll also notice that there's hardly any green. I wanted to take a look at what would be there [on that site] if you didn't have such an intensive watering infrastructure. All the urban lot species are invasive and nonnative and pretty scruffy. There's actually a lot of nuances in the color, but hardly any native plants are green."

Levy stresses that her "diagrams" are not to be taken as a literal replication. Instead, she's trying to evoke the latent lyrical qualities that reside in seemingly mundane pockets of untamed growth. "Even though a bull thistle looks very different, what it feels like to me is a big black stopper. The pineapple weed doesn't look like a bunch of coiled copper, but it sort of feels like that. My moment of metaphysics was when I realized I wanted to translate how the thing felt, not what it looked like."

Stepping back into scientist mode, Levy adds, "The growth pattern of how the plants actually come out of the ground is true to each species."

Reshaping the contours of her Oldfield required a fair measure of backbreaking labor. Levy spent much of her time on hands and knees with a drill gun, forming tiny pockets in the fiberboard platform for each stem.

For Levy, nature has served as both muse and direct participant in her work. She's developed pieces with tides, mold and rainfall, embarking at times on more political work, including a project that traces the impact of acid mine drainage. "My mission," she says, "is to make people more aware of how nature actually works. There is quite a bit of wild land in all these little leftover places, so this work is about bringing that leftover into the center of the city. We glance at an abandoned lot but we don't really notice the nuances. I'm hoping if you get to know nature, you might get to love it, and then you'll want to protect it or think about it a little more. The best comment I ever got from somebody was, 'Wow, I'll never look at the vacant lot the same way again.' "

*

'The Tender Land: Pasadena Festival of Art, History, Music and Science'

The Tender Land festival, which continues through Jan. 31, includes performances, exhibitions, films and other programs presented by 14 arts and educational institutions and other entities. Information is available by calling (626) 793-8171.