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| Arlene Slavin: Mediating Public Space by Carolee Thea |
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to
create that interface. At first, I made painted screens in rectangular formats
like their Japanese counterparts and then I cut forms out of plywood, carving
edges and incising interior shapes to contain birds, fish, and clouds. Lighting
them produced silhouettes and shadows, and soon I brought them outdoors,
where natural light created another kind of ambiance. CT: Screens, with their elaborate cut-out filigree designs were employed in Muslim countries to allow the segregated women of the harem to peer out. AS: Yes, but it was the elegance and clarity of the Moorish screens that interested me. CT: Screens, gates, and fences have the purpose of partitioning, creating the notion of inside/outside, in front of or behind. AS: Yes, and they can mediate the line between those spaces. Cathedral Bestiary was the first, a small gate at the entrance to The Cathedral School at St. John the Divine in New York City. Bestiaries in which animals depicted moral characteristics were used in the Middle Ages to teach moral lessons. I wanted to make work that the public saw in their everyday environments. Soon after that, the New York City Parks Department asked me to participate in a project called "Noah's Art," to create a small animal sculpture for the Central Park Zoo. They selected a group of artists and commissioned us to do temporary art for the park. In this, my first cut steel sculpture, I networked and slotted silhouetted images of bears with an interior cutout of a flock of geese. CT: Many of your sculptures combining two-dimensional forms are Matisse-like, both in their formal aspect and the influence of non-Western art. AS: It was the two-dimensionality of Matisse's space and the flatness of Japanese screens or Persian and Indian miniatures that informed my painting and continues to inhabit my work. Now when I make a piece I am interested in the material, in combining steel elements in space that flow with the simplicity of a Japanese scroll. CT: You recently worked on a major project for the North Carolina Zoological Park. AS: Yes, it began when I lost a competition at the zoo. However, the design curator, Ellen Greer, liked my work and called me several times with potential projects. Then the junction Plaza concept took form and was funded. This particular area is in the center of the zoo, between the North American and the African Habitats where families and tour groups rest and |
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New York-based artist Arlene Slavin has created more than 30 public sculptures. She received her BFA at Cooper Union and MFA at Pratt institute and has exhibited with Alexander Milliken, Brooke Alexander, and the Fischbach Galleries. In the last 2S years she's had 21 solo exhibitions and 80 &roup shows, including the Whitney Biennial in 1976. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Prudential Life Insurance.
Carolee Thea: The art historical moment when Rauscbenberg and
Johns negotiated the connection between painting and sculpture continues
to influence artists today. Was it this climate that stimulated your transformation
from painter to sculptor? |
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