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Indianapolis Museum of Art
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Channels: Contemporary ArtEventsMaya LinTalks
In the fall of 2007, the Indianapolis Museum of Art unveiled "Above and Below", a commissioned installation by Maya Lin on the Fortune Balcony of the Asian art galleries; this work was inspired by the complex structure of underground White River tributaries in south central Indiana.
Emerging on the international scene with her design of the Vietnam War Memorial in 1982, Lin’s work has always hovered at the intersection of art, nature and architecture. Watch as artist Maya Lin discusses her works of art and impressive career.
The goal for all of us in working with great artists in this institution is to leave a mark, a mark for all time and an opportunity for us to see the world just a little bit differently
and with that, Maya I welcome you to the podium, thank you.
[Applause]
Thank you, Max. Glad to be here. I don't go home to Athens, Ohio anymore. My mom moved away about four years ago, so this is my closest touch to coming home
because it sort of reminds me of the landscape in southeastern Ohio, although I think we're a little bit more rolling hills. This is a talk that will...
I don't wanna go on too long and I apologize if I do. I tried to pare it down and just focus on the art, but I also do architecture and I also have done memorials.
I actually still am doing a few of those and I sort of see my work as a little bit of a tripod and to have cut out the other two and just focused on the art, I didn't feel, you know, in a funny way comfortable standing up here.
So, I'm gonna very briefly touch on, at the start, some of the memorials, some of the architecture, I apologize I am not gonna talk that much about them,
and then I am gonna launch into the art and end with the making of "Above and Below" for the IMA, so here we go....
In 1981, Vietnam Memorial, I was, I think, still in college when I made this. You never know what you're doing as an artist. In fact, I didn't even see myself as an artist
when I made this piece. I was an architecture undergrad. I got labeled as such. I returned to Yale after I finished this piece to start and then finish
my architectural degree and I found myself living almost more in the sculpture department. I don't know why, I don't think you do, but funny thing is I had this rather large piece
that, "what is it?" It is a memorial, but it's also about time and history, but it's also integrated directly into the earth and I think how you develop
as an artist or as an architect, I had no idea, I just started making the work. In 1989, after grad school,
I had been commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center to build a memorial to civil rights and again, like the Vietnam Memorial, and I do believe the monuments are hybrids, they're in between art and architecture,
they have a functionality but their function is in a way symbolic or conceptual, but again this one, yet again, uses time and history intertwining
a person's death with a change in legislation, sometimes legislation led to a riot which led to someone's death. By walking around the table, again this timeline
there's a gap between Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 and Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968 and that gap signifies that this is
a slightly open-ended circle, though what this memorial captures is sort of this Civil Rights era. The motto that I chose on the wall, which is a full quote,
"We are not satisfied, we shall not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," spoke to what, the host, the Southern Poverty Law Center
their ongoing struggles for racial equality, but also the fact that this is an open timeline talking about both the past and the future that I didn't cover here.
Another piece, not so much dealing with loss at all but I was asked by Yale to commemorate women at Yale and I had no idea what that meant
and I created something called the Women's Table and again it starts with spiral of numbers but there's a beginning when women first started at Yale
but of course there was no end, although a lot of people said, "Well...how do you end the spiral?" I chose to end the spiral in the year that I put the piece in which was, god I can't remember at this point,
I think it was 1993 and it starts with zeros and it starts with graduate students and ironically the first class there were thirteen women
who were admitted into the Yale School of Art because the funder Mr. Street funded to build the building and he had two daughters.
But what you don't realize is that when Yale first went coed, they allowed only a very set number of women in. There was a very set quota because Yale still had to graduate
a thousand Yale men and so women were let in but there was a very strict quota. So again, I kind of mind that history and let this be about numbers and let this be about the emerging number
of women at Yale enrolled in both grad and undergrad, but you also begin to see, it parallels during the two World Wars. There's a growth in the numbers because, I think,
more men went to war, so they filled it Yale School of Nursing actually, but again, facts, time, history begin to play a part in some of these pieces.
These are very urban pieces. Another piece that I just completed a piece a few years ago for Stanford is called "Time Table" and it's in their computer engineering quad and it is a clock.
The ring is a second hand, the disc is the minutes, the whole inner circle tells you the hours and then the numbers on the outside are Pacific Standard Time,
Daylight Saving Time, and then Greenwich Mean Time because you are on the computer quad, so what time is it really when we were all talking on cyber space and I asked quite a few number of computer experts
and they all said in the end, Greenwich Mean Time is the safest way to do it. But what you don't realize is, you'll notice these markers, these little sundial markers around and they mark the months of the year,
January through December and in a funny way time is slightly relative to where you are, so what you'll notice is in January it will be over on one side
but it will make one complete rotation in the course of the year and so I'm sort of making a point to say, in a funny way, though there might be universal time
that we talk about, time is somewhat relative to where you are standing and then this is another piece that dealt with time, its called "Eclipsed Time",
it is in the MTA Arts for Transit program in Penn Station and it's a clock, lit from above, it's in the ceiling, lit from above with fiber optics. At 12:00 midnight,
the solid disc completely eclipses the light source and at 12:00 noon it's either all the way over on one side and it tells the time accurately up to fifteen minutes
by the shadow line it makes and then this is another use of time. This was put in, in the millennium year, in the year 2000, in Grand Rapids; it's the heart of a park,
four acre park, which I sort of took over and used three different usages of water, solid, liquid, and ice
of which the center piece is a skating rink and embedded in it is a fiber optic array of the midnight sky over Grand Rapids in the year I put the piece in.
So, in a funny way, it commemorates one point in time but also you can skate over it. The light refracts through the ice. You can see in the step terraces on the upper side versus the lower side,
the skating rink is embedded on one side and then it flies free on the other. It gives a perception that it is a slightly tilted plane.
Yet, when you are skating on it, we all intellectually understand that water freezes flat. So, what I am beginning to explore with this is that
odd level of just the question in perception, "Am I skating on a slightly tilted plane, but isn't that impossible?" and you may notice it
and you may not, but that's something that has been of great interest to me and this is a very quick segway.
I've also been working on architectural works. I never thought in my architecture I could also play with time and history and memory, and so I'm only going to talk about a couple pieces.
This is a historic barn in Clinton, Tennessee; I turned it into a library at the retreat for the Children's Defense Fund
and I left the old skin and I cut away at it and slipped in new modern skin inside it and it is now the reading room library.
But I was also asked, as well, to create a brand new structure. So again, I was able to do one old, one new,
everything at the Children's Defense Fund Retreat is a one story log cabin and how could I, as a modernist, create a new work?
And so I thought of a barn as a shape that is both modern yet vernacular and I also thought of the motto of the Children's Defense Fund,
"Dear Lord, be good to me, my boat is so small and the sea is so large." So, I ended up making a bit of an ark
twice a year for graduation ceremonies, because it's a training center, they need capacity that is double the space of their chapel. I didn't want to create a building that was over scale to the sight,
so this area and they used to have a big tent that they would have erected. Instead, I have given them roller furling in this whole trellis area, tents over in inclement weather so they can use
the space as an inside-outside space when they need to go to that capacity and that's just the inside of the space
and there's an administration area, the trellis, and then the boat shape. Another time where I've done old and new, I was asked to come and take a look at an abandoned chapel
on the grounds of Manhattanville and they didn't quite know where they wanted to go with it. They wanted students to be able to use it. So, I thought again of doing one old, one new,
but both green houses, one a very primitive passive solar and the other one a little bit more high tech solar. So, this is the chapel which I just placed a glass roof on
and the students are basically using both and taking the temperatures, taking water analysis and it's almost become a part of the curriculum of the school.
It's cool during the summer by solar fans that pulls air through the crib to cool it and then in the winter we started growing Boston Ivy so that in the summer months
it shades it, but in the winter the leaves fall off and you allow it to be sort of almost a real green house. Along with it,
we created a one classroom learning lab that there is a water treatment facility, a living system that's in the front and they take the water from the nearby stream
and they do tests and analyses on it, but this is a little structure that shuts down on its east and west sides in the wintertime so that
it only allows solar heat gain from a trombe wall in the front and then there's a ground coupled heat loop. So, this is about as high tech solar as you can get
and they compare the two and they compare the notes on how the sunlight reacts and how these buildings change in temperature during the course of the year.
Flexibility is something that I played with a lot in the architecture. This was one apartment I did where it converts from being a two bedroom, two baths to being a three bedroom, three baths.
I love, almost architecture is a bit of toy if you know how to use it, so everything sort of opens up and shuts down
as in the table, is a bit of a toy. The shower, one of the smaller showers was too small, so when it's not in use it hides away
and that lead to one of my first houses which is called "The Box House" and it, too, opens up and shuts down with slatted screens, so it's sort of has a home and away position.
The kitchen downstairs opens up completely. In the floor plan, there's no interior sheet rock wall, it's literally a box within a box
and how you open and shut the box determines how you use the space, which leads me to the first of the projects
very similar to what I did here and that I came in as an artist, but I couldn't resist meddling a little bit
with the architecture. This is a project I did for American Express for their new financial headquarters. They wanted to create a winter garden and I thought of, I don't know if any of you read topo lines,
I thought of pulling topography inside and what happens if you take a simple roll of a hill,
something that you would barely notice out of doors. What happens if you bring it inside and turn it into an architectural wood floor?
The piece is called "A Character of a Hill, Under Glass" but the building I was given to work in was kind of heavy, boxy, there were columns in the corners,
I didn't feel I could create what I wanted to create inside, so I put on my architect hat on and brought in my own engineers and my curtain wall experts
and redesigned the outside of the box. Every now and again, the art and the architecture come together. Very rarely do they come together and merge aesthetics,
but every now and again I modify the architecture in order to accommodate the art work that goes in.
So, you can begin to see just, I guess, the difference in what I had and what I ended up designing, sort of pushing the columns off center, floating
a water wall outside and then beginning to bring this hill inside and these are just studies of what that hill would be in earlier models
and you can see the data lines are the benches and the planters, they kind of give you a straight path through it and that's just sort of how we made it
and that's how it looks today. So, the question is, "What happens when you bring a hill inside?", and I have been told even though this is corporate headquarters
open to the public, people come in, businessmen, they take their shoes off and they don't sit on the benches necessarily, they picnic on the floor.
So, again that bare level of when you bring something natural inside and what do people do, how do people react is something I'm very interested in.
As well, the water wall on the outside, I always wanted to create a fountain that you didn't have to shut off, being in Minneapolis I allow that one to freeze, so you get to see the city through a layer of ice in the wintertime.
But most of the time in my art, I've been working out-of-doors and I do these very large outdoor art installations which one of the first I did,
which was completed in 1996, was based on this naturally occurring water wave called a stokes wave and it's for the University of the Michigan Aerospace Engineering Building
and I am extremely site specific, so I started talking to a lot of the professors in aerospace and they started giving me books on flight and fluid dynamics
and I came across this image in a book Van Dyke's Album of Fluid Motion and I said this is it, I go running over to the scientist and I said,
"I think I am gonna make a piece that is based on this," and one of the aerospace engineers said, "Well it belongs over in naval engineering." So, sometimes when you talk to scientists
you have to say "I might be talking to you, I might be taking a lot of questions down and I might not use any of it" because they tend to be very specific. Anyway, he's actually very happy with the piece.
So, I started studying up what that meant and it goes into model after model after model and then laying it out
and beginning to sculpt it on site and it's called "The Wave Field". It's 10,000 sq. ft. The wave is meant to be of human scale, so you can sit in the wave,
read a book, curl up for about four to five feet above your head and that was what would be the first and what I didn't realize was a series...
it changes drastically in the classrooms above so the daylight changes its shape and its form.
The second in the series I didn't choose to focus on a water wave, but what water does over the beach sand is it about to hit the land, so it's a very shallow
wave formation which is 30,000 sq. ft at the Federal Court House in Miami.
And then the last in the series again, I tend to work in series at times. This one mathematically iterated. I imagine it would be 90,000 sq. ft. It's at Storm King.
It has not been dedicated yet, we're actually literally waiting for the grass to grow. I took over an abandoned gravel pit that they really didn't know what to do with,
it's an EPA reclamation site, took me about three years to get permission to open it up and then do a complete reclamation of it.
This is how it started. So what would happen if you could bring the waves over your head so that when you're in a row of waves, you actually lose sight of the wave rows
adjacent to you and that's the site I was given and its right next to Goldsworthy's walls, but nobody was using this part of Storm King
because they had actually used this site as a gravel pit for the last 20 years, and it was bit of an eye sore, so they hid it behind a very large earth berm,
and I was able to use this earth berm to build most of the piece. I think, 75 percent of the fill came from the berm, and we were out there all fall
building with the bulldozer crew and you can begin to see, I don't know if you can see at the scale of the piece,
the waves range in height from being about ten to fifteen feet above your height, it kind of grew to own this space which is fairly large space, it's about eleven acres,
this piece ended up being about 300,000 square feet, so we're now literally waiting for the grass to grow
which you can begin to see it, which leads me to how do I, and I work at a fairly large scale, bring that aesthetic inside,
which is again what we'll talk about at the end with "Above and Below".
My first show was called "Topologies", and this was the largest piece in that show, it was sixteen-by-eighteen-feet, again studying wave formations.
Is it a dune? Is it water? Very interested in the motion it was making, but again being very aware, and this show
traveled the country from 1998 to 2000. You can see in the background another piece called "Avalanche",
made out of broken car glass, which again is a medium I work with. This is a piece I installed at the Wexner Center called "Groundswell", it's in three levels
using about forty tons of broken car glass creating indoor gardens that you could view.
But back to the show, this is my first show I've ever done, the first time I tried to move what I did outside inside. "Avalanche" was the only one that site specific,
it changed with every move, it went to about five or six different art institutions of which at NYU at the Grey, I poured it up against a window wall
so you could look into it from the outside street. Another group of sculptures in the series is called "Rock Field" just focusing you in
on a simple hand blown object that's based on, I collect water-worn rocks, and so I had a box of rocks and I worked with glass blowers,
and you'll be amazed at how complex these forms are and we don't even look at them anymore because we obviously know what a water-worn rock looks like,
so this piece was all about understanding, studying, almost expressing the pure volume of those forms.
Another group of series was poured glass disks that slightly tilted more and more and it was the shadow line they made
that changed through the course of the pieces as the piece tilted.
And then, I did some drawings of cross-sections through the earth of which in the middle drawing you can see a spike...
any idea what it is?...It's Hawaii, and we never tend to look where we can't see
and I began to get very interested in revealing. I think a lot of these works are very much about revealing parts of nature that we're overlooking or not even thinking about,
so that's one of the tallest mountains, if not the tallest mountain in the world...which leads me to my second show which is traveling the country now. It's called "Systematic Landscapes".
It literally took me eight years to figure out because the first show that was dealing with some of the things I was working with outside, they still came inside and became objects,
and I was trying to say, can I stay environmental, can I stay spatial, can I make installations and come inside.
So if you remember a character of hill, under glass, that piece was open to the public, so it had to be handicapped accessible.
When I walked on it the first time, my instinct was what if I could make a hill inside that truly was a hill and you could climb up it and touch the ceiling.
This is a model, I tend to model it and model it and model it, from two approaches. It looks like a cresting water wave and from the other two sides it looks like a massive solid. This is it
being built in a warehouse before it was installed at the Henry in Seattle. It's now in San Diego at the Contemporary,
and this is one of the major pieces in this show, "Systematic Landscape". It is called "2 x 4 Landscape". It's also if you think about how computers and science looks at a hill, it's a pixilated landscape,
but again it is consciously ambiguous. Is it a land form? Is it a water form? It goes about twelve feet off the ground at its highest point.
There are three major pieces in the show of which the second one I focus on an actual water terrain, underwater terrain, and I needed a singular point,
and so I started calling up and I talked to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Society, and they said, take a look at an island called Bouvet,
it was made when three fracture zones came together and again this is how a computer sees terrain; it takes an XY grid and pulls it,
and this piece ended up being called "Water Line". In the balcony level of The Henry, when it was first installed, it was about two feet from the peak
and everything else is underwater terrain, which I think directly inspired what I installed at the IMA.
As far as my interest in creating these drawings in space, but they're drawings of actual terrain, often times water.
The third major piece in "Systematic Landscape", we've got one you walked on and the second one is the one you walked under, and this one I wanted to get you
to walk through the landscape, so it's three very different relationships back to the land, and for this one, I chose a mountainside terrain where
we live in the summer near Telluride, and it's a mountain called Sneffels, and there's a hike we do every summer that is called the Blue Lake Pass,
and so this piece is called "Blue Lake Pass" and I took it and created a piece that you can walk through
and become almost a part of this stratigraphic layers of the earth. In the background, you see, sort of, what looks like a drawing on the wall
being site specific, I install one river for each time it travels. When it was in St. Louis,
I chose the Mississippi-Missouri to focus on, and I made them out of simple sewing pins.
And this is the Columbia of which all those little places where it looks like it's puddling, that's a dam, and you can sort of see the dispersion
where the dams are with the pins, that's where it ends up in the ocean, so it's a drawing, but it's also a three-dimensional line drawing.
This is just another little drawing I made of a fragment of the Volga.
When I installed a month ago in San Diego, there is no river of note there, and so instead, I took a look at their floor, and they had a fissure and they had a crack in the concrete,
so I took about three days with dental picks and a couple assistants, and we chiseled out and inlaid a sliver leaf river in their floor, so it is called "The Depot River",
because San Diego Contemporary Gluckman just had finished and it's in an existing train depot, so that's that piece, but to me what's interesting is
a fractal plate that cracks or what cracks in nature, is it that different a phenomena than a crack in a concrete floor and can I make you pay attention a little bit more
to again a very mundane thing that actually we think of as a nuisance, so that's that piece. Other rivers that I'm working on right now, this is an areal view of the Yangtze,
so this is a sliver casting about 11 feet of the Yangtze River, and then this is a piece that will go into
Las Vegas, and I took it on because I proposed something that I actually didn't think they'd take. This is the Colorado River and it will be cast in reclaimed silver
and it will be eighty-seven feet long and it will be at the MGM Casino, and I'm studying it up right now. So we started making fragments of that river.
So again, I am very interested in focusing on water a lot, natural landscapes and phenomena. This is another use of water, this is a series called "Dew Point",
just imagine if you threw water on a concrete floor and it beaded up and then back to the show,
these are called "Bodies of Water". You've got the long skinny one is the Red Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Black Sea is at the bottom, and I turned them into plywood sculptures.
And again, it's all about what's underneath, that's the Caspian, as well as these are more of the drawings. These are little sketches I do, there are landscapes,
but I'm as interested in the shadow they make because how does a sculptor draw and I draw three-dimensionally, so I am as interested in the wire
and the play of the shadow it makes, as the drawing on the wall, and then I'd go running over to the Strand, which is a used bookstore in Manhattan.
And again, I don't sketch these, I just start cutting into these wet atlases with an Exacto blade, and it's again how a sculptor is drawing, but I'm drawing three-dimensionally
and I am creating landscapes within these used atlases.
And then in the show as well, I took a couple of my large outdoor pieces that I had made plasticine sketches of and I cast those in bronze.
This is again some of the maquettes for some of my outdoor work of which the first of the earth drawings is called "11 Minute Line" and it literally started in Wanas, Sweden.
I woke up one morning having visited the site a few times and I made this little drawing in the gravel driveway, and it became a 1,600 foot long earthen drawing
that you can walk, and again its six to twelve feet, so its two meters or four meters
and what happens if you walk in a meadow, this is a cow pasture, but you are walking six to ten feet above the plain of the meadow,
how will that change your perception?
I'm also very interested in what is the character and personality of a line drawing, it is a working cow pasture, the cows sort of like it...
and it led me to another series which I just, am working on one in Louisville, Kentucky. This is called "The Kentucky Line" and I consciously wanted to explore a more modern line,
I sort of see this as '50s boomerang sort of shape and its a line that goes above and below grade and it's about 1,300 feet long, it's at a private collection.
This is how it looked last year and this is how it's beginning to look now, and we're waiting for the grass to grow.
In this series I will close it down at some point but I'm going to make one last line drawing and it's a line where you can't tell if it's language or drawing
and here's another, this is just, I will skim through this. This is a drawing I made which is a center piece for Arts Plaza for UC California in Irvine
and I put it in an outdoor classroom and I made a line as the text and the water peculates up through the line and so there's an outdoor classroom
which is that piece you just saw and there's an outdoor screening room where the students can watch movies but this is that table,
it's called "The Drawing Table" and that's the screening room and this is what it used to look like and this is how we were able to deal with a fire lane,
and then the video monitors that watch each of the three entrances and do a continuous loop playback as to what's going on or a student can enter their videotape
and tell their friends to go watch their movie on this one of the four boxes...and another way I've used data and input technologies,
a piece I did for my hometown in Athens, Ohio. It is called "Input" and I asked my brother, who is a language poet, to collaborate with me. It was his childhood memories of Athens, Ohio
and then my relationship to Athens, Ohio was even though my parents taught there, my first working relationship with them was I taught myself cobalt and fortran.
This will date me, when I was in high school and I couldn't type, so you get to like the 40th numerical entry and you would have to throw it out because you had a typo
and I'd be stuck there typing and typing these damn punch cards for hours, so I just wanted to kind of tie my personal connection in to the piece
and this is a just a fragment of my brother's poetry which is the map you are reading is a kind of topographic landscape made of words, photographs, and Appalachian topsoil
carved out to resemble rectangular bits of binary code. And so it's all about memory and through the main body of the work is this sort of non-narrative but poem about memory
and the outer ones are more fragmented words. Though it is his childhood anyone who spent time in Athens will connect and one question is how do you read something like this?
In a way, once we've experienced something how we pull memories back out is nonlinear. It's not random but it is certainly not linear
at which point this is a piece that plays into that idea of people who have spent time there might connect to some of the language and not to some of the words
but it's again it's a three acre or four acre park and you can sit in, it is like an outdoor classroom each raised or lowered rectangle is about sixteen-by-twenty-four-feet,
so you can actually hold a class out-of-doors...and then I'm gonna end with three projects.
This is the fourth of what will be five memorials or pieces, things that deal with history. I actually don't call them memorials and it's a quite complex project.
It's called "Confluence", it's the state of Washington asked me to get involved at the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark
but the people that asked me in weren't just the state officials but the members of the Umatilla, the Chinook, the Nez Perce,
and about three other tribes that came in and they asked me to get involved as one chief you put it, "It isn't that Lewis and Clark came in to an undiscovered land,
we were there," and they just thought I could maybe tell it differently. So, how do I start? I started with where Lewis and Clark ended, at Cape Disappointment
and I ended up creating three places. There's a lot of restoration, reclamation of landscapes in this, as well as teaching you a little bit about each place.
It's cultural history, it's ecological history, it's relation back to Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark I use not so much as an object, but as a lens.
They gave us an amazing glimpse at what this place was like exactly 200 years ago and if I could pull their journals out along the Lewis and Clark Trail
and give you a glimpse but then at times I go deeper and tell you what the place was like for the tribes that had been living there for thousands of years
and I also give you an ecological assessment of how much has changed to the present day. So very quickly, this is what I was met with.
I met with a lot of parking lots and restrooms and this is what it looks like today. So, it's a complete restoration to sand dunes of that area and also beginning to understand
this is the culmination where Lewis and Clark came to the Pacific and I thought at times the pathways would converge but at times they don't meet
and so there's a walkway that hugs what used to be the original waterline before the jetty was put in and all this other land was accreted and it leads you to a quiet circle of seven totems
and that's the Chinook's area and it's seven because in the Native American tradition there are seven cardinal directions, not four, so it's north, south, east, west
but it's also up, down, and in. So at times I'm also contrasting different cultural belief systems within. This is the pathway
and exactly 200 years since the time Lewis and Clark set foot there, the Chinook tribal elder blessed the site and in it he read a poem
and of this poem, it was always about nature and then teach us and show us the way. So, it's very different relationship to nature and so I asked permission to inscribe that poem
because I didn't just wanted to deal with the history of the Native Americans; I also wanted to incorporate the present day interactions between the confluence project and the tribes.
Right next to it, leading you right to the ocean is Lewis and Clarks listing of their entire journey and again very factual; latitude, longitude, mile markers.
Just a very different way of measuring nature and looking at nature and I wanted to contrast those two paths, but you'll notice as you take this walkway to the ocean,
you're not walking through undiscovered territory, you are actually walking through many people's homelands
when you read this summary statement which they put together then when they were wintering that year and that's the path that now leads to the ocean.
On the opposite side, which is the estuary side not the ocean side, again I was met with this and we restored it to native wetlands
which drain naturally and you're left looking out on this bay which was obscured by the parking lot
and you're met with a quote by Lewis and Clark, "Went to a handsome bay." But they were so busy going to the ocean, they barely noticed it but then there is a footnote, and it tells you how
ecologically important this bay was and how it is still is...and somewhere in the middle, there is a place there was rusting stainless steel fish cutting table
and there I put a new one, it's made out the basalt and inscribed on it is the creation myth of the Chinook and it's "The Cutting of Fish the Wrong Way,"
and from the blood of the fish springs an eagle, from the eagle an egg is laid and is hatched and it's the Chinook people. So, today you might be cutting your king salmon but as you read that story, or not,
you'll realize you're in the Chinook homelands.
Another one is at Sacagawea where we were embedding seven story circles which will tell you culturally what this place was and how important it was to
the tribes that traded and lived here. The most eastern side is Chief Timothy which we will be renaming with the Nez Perce tribe,
they're going to choose a name that is much more about the nature around it and I was given almost a natural amphitheater in this island
in the river and when the Nez Perce dedicated this site, the men faced east, the women faced west, the elders faced, I think,
they faced north and no one could pass behind them. So again incorporating present day activities I'm creating a natural amphitheater
that almost commemorates and lays out that seating arrangement. Another one is a bird blind, which will take every citing of Lewis and Clark,
all the animals they sighted but it will tell you ecological assessment; endangered, extinct, what their status is today
and I'm also working on what would be the fifth and last of the monuments or memorials and it's called "Missing" or "What is Missing" and it will deal with endangered species and habitats
making a really close link with 20 percent of all global warming is caused by deforestation, this is one of the quickest combinations I say it, can we save two birds with one tree
and so it will focus you and it will show you, I've been working with World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, Nature Conservancy. There's a consortium of small and large groups
I've asked to bring in to this, so I'll make you aware of things you are not thinking of, scale, abundancy, the ability of animals to migrate, I'll connect them to the ecosystems they need and that are disappearing, but then I'll show you
what the experts are doing all over the world and then I'll show you what we can all do in our everyday lives that can make a huge impact on species protection
and habitat protection. So what's the second most traded good around the world after oil? It's coffee.
And you could go out from now on and you have a choice of fair trade organic shade grown versus plantation grown and it will show you the habitats at risk
if you buy plantation-grown coffee. So, again it's trying to give you hope, this is what the experts are doing and this is what you can do
but it's called it can start launch at the California Academy of Sciences as "What is Missing", this is something, this is a cowbird egg in a robin's nest.
One of the things I'm going to highlight, I'm going to highlight things that you don't realize or disappearing, so the top twenty songbirds in our country are in a 70 percent to 40 percent decline,
so literally the sounds we heard as children in our backyard are no longer there...or it'll take historical reference
to show you what just was, right around the corner. This cultural anthropologist gave me as a very first accounting of deforestation,
its Plato 360 BC and we all think that the Mediterranean is dry and arid, not at all.
This is the giant Mekong River Catfish, which is probably going to disappear within the next ten years...
and this is, there will be species I will be citing that will have gone extinct during as I make this piece,
but I'm going to ask a question when I launch it at the California Academy of Sciences on Earth Day 2009 and then I'm going to work with these groups and the Van Alen Institute has also agreed to participate.
Can we envision a map that shows a future of the balances our carbon footprint and creates a way of living sustainably with the earth?
Can we imagine rearranging the lights? And so these are two of the ideas. I actually want to co-opt billboards on Earth Day 2010 during the biodiversity summit
and just show a twenty-minute clip. It is always twenty minutes because every twenty minutes a species disappears and then the image on the left is an interactive video table
which will debut at the California Academy of Sciences on Earth Day 2009. But for California Academy I'm giving them not one art work but two and on the right-hand side
I will be installing, this August, a wire landscape, it's called "Where the Land Meets the Sea" and it focuses on the area, that tiny little dashed line
at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, before it empties out into the ocean...
and it'll be fabricated the same place that fabricated "Above and Below"...and I will end with "Above and Below".
So, this is the Bluesprings Cavern on the White River and when I first came to Indiana, again I tend to focus on site specific
issues that deal with nature and topography and I was a little taken aback because it's a little flat and I happen to have an assistant who is from Indiana and she said,
"look below ground" and I realized that you've got the second longest underground river system in the country; I think Kentucky is the first.
It's the White River and we contacted Bluesprings Cavern and they were kind enough to let us go down there and we worked with another geologist, Art Palmer,
and we went in and we found, we looked at a few different areas in the cave system and we needed something because I wanted to do something actual scale
and a lot of the areas were either too small or they got too wide. You've got a terrace out there that's sixteen-by-one hundred-feet, sort of an odd skinny space,
how could I capture, at scale, a part of this cave, so we had to go find the right section and then we started working with
what that could be in model and at one time I had "Above and Below" both above and below but it looked way too busy,
so I tend to model things up and model things up because I just look larger and larger until I get it right and then we decided while I still wanted to capture the above and below
but what if I split it. The first three bays describes the upper part of the cave, the last two bays describe the lower part, what's underwater...
and those were the models and that's how it was getting framed and built and bent in the studio and then this we installed in the fall.
We didn't get it in fast enough to do another part of it, so that's sort of how it looks and at one point where the upper part
meets the lower part, you actually see the full cross section of the cave...and then I couldn't resist, being trained
as an architect, helping out in designing the pattern of the stone on the floor, it just seemed I had to do it
and it leads me back to the character of hill, there are times when the architect hat comes on. I do tend to keep the art and the architecture separate. I love them for their differences,
but at times I end up working on both in one realm and the inspiration for this if you go to some of the drinking fountains, you'll see the Indiana limestone's
sort of in relief and I took one look at that and said that will be the sort of the narrow pattern that will become the floor, and so that's the talk. Thank you very much!
[Applause]
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