art.308:sculpture studio

hannah piper burns

project 3- site and installation
artist research

Judy Pfaff creates installations that are first and foremost about landscape, both the external landscape of places that inform and influence the artist and the internal psychological landscape. The objects used to create these works also straddle the line between referential (as in Osorio’s basketball posters and family pictures) and metaphorical (Bourgeois’ glass spheres), incorporating building and architectural materials with more natural, organic materials. Her piece “Round Hole Square Peg” (1997) spans several rooms of the Andre Emmerich gallery, which creates a landscape that changes and evolves as the viewer moves between the individual spaces that make up the entire piece. The rooms are connected to each other and to the viewer by both the persistence of steel pipes/tubing and also by a series of holes in the wall that make objects and people in other rooms visible to the viewer. Almost in the way that a haunted house is a specific environment created to locate the visitor in a specific psychological and physical mindset by manipulating them through space with the placement of objects, “Round Hole Square Peg” is an environment (or as I said before, a landscape), rather than a microcosm or a site.

Robert Irwin's work has been described as "site-generated", and the particular qualities of a site are often what Irwin responds to when creating an installation. For example, His piece "Two Running Violet V Forms", which is located at the University of California San Diego, plays off the tension between natural and man-made beauty. The site itself is man made, with eucalyptus trees planted in a geometric formation. The fences Irwin constructed do not actually act as fences but rather as screen and augments rather than restrains the trees, and their blue-violet color complements both the green of the leaves and the yellow sunlight that filters through them. In other works, Irwin makes ample use of scrim, which has properties of being able to alter the light of an environment. Like Kira Lynn Davis, his work is primarily focused on issues of light and perception of space, and his installations both augment the site where they are located and force the viewer to re-examine their perception of the environment.

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