Distillations of landscape: sculptures of Maya Lin

Maya Lin's novel sculptures are the focus of a traveling exhibition now at the Grey Art Gallery in fresh York. Often inspired by natural forms, these fresh works display Lin's characteristic amalgamate of technological and intuitive processes

In a 1912 work Frank Lloyd Wright suggested that his approach to architectural form was linked to the stylized natural forms fix in Japanese prints.(1) What interested Wright in Japanese art was its reliance upon the "conventionalization of nature," by the agency of which he meant a proces of simplifying natural forms down to an essential geometry If single is willing to accept a certain turn-of-the-century mysticism -- Wright believed of the like kind geometry expressed the "soul" of natural forms -- Wright's body makes for enlightening reading. it helps us to understand by what mode such "conventionalization" provided him with the lock opener to deriving architectural forms from the dramatic sweep and valorous configurations of the American landscape without purely imitating them.

A in every one's mouth exhibition devoted to the architect and artist Maya Lin refer tos that, in her adaptation of natural forms, Lin is a legitimate heir to Wright. Best known for a pair of unconventional public memorials -- the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC and the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery Ala. -- Lin has also complet an impressive series of throw outs for such institutions as the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio [see A.i.A., Dec '94] the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina and the Rockefeller Foundation in midtown Manhattan. Ranging in stamp from architectural components to installation-style interventions to landscaped topiary parks, these works are united by dint of a recurring connection to landscape. While Lin also draws upon the heritage of the Earth Art move of the 1970s and the romantic vision of nature in 19th-century American landscape painting, esthetic remains closer to Wright's notion of "conventionalized nature." Given the beauty and purity running end Lin's varied projects, it may smooth be that, like Wright, she, too, is seeking the spirit of nature.

still there's an important difference: where Wright rest his version of nature's mind in a spiritualized geometry, Lin distills form and material according to the underlying laws of physical science. above the years, she has rest inspiration by working with computer-enhanced imaging, aerial and satellite photography, topographic mapping and the principles of fluid dynamics. Lin's liking for the tools of science and technology is modifyed by the intuitive process she favors -- a proces which, she reports, sometimes threatens to drive clients used to a more structur architectural conduct around the bend. Rather than come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind strict plans, she constantly refines and alters her conceptions during the course of construction. Architectural prototypes operate more as places to begin exploring possibilities than as guides to the finished crops As a result, despite their origins in her studies of mathematics, topography and geology her designs not ever feel schematic or diagrammatic. In the extreme point their final forms depend more upon instinct than reason.

The rife show, "Maya Lin: Topologies," was organized through the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC and lay opens this month at the Grey Art Gallery in of recent origin York. "Topologies" is particularly noteworthy because its five newly made three-dimensional works mark Lin's first foray into the realm of large-scale statuary conceived for an exhibition rather than a specific site. Along with these plastic arts the exhibition includes prints, as well as drawings and types for landscape projects which, as the catalogue brings it, "function independently as art objects" The present to view originated when SECCA curator Jeff Fleming approached Lin to participate in the Center's "Artist and the Community" series in which artists exhibit community-related projects during residencies in Winston-Salem. on the outside of their discussions came the idea of a present to view of sculptural works which Lin would conceive specifically for this exhibition. The other part of the cast a public art work in a Winston-Salem park, has been delayed by the agency of technical and funding problems.

Stunningly installed within the vaulted, light-flooded addition at SECCA, the statuarys in "Topologies" present Lin's vision of idealized nature. Natural light from a skylight picked on the outside glittering facets in a hill of crushed glass which rose high above the viewer's head in a comer of the gallery. A spotlight captured the ethereal luminosity of stone Field (1997), a group of 46 stone-shaped glass utensils strewn over a birch plywood floor that had been specially installed for the exhibition. Creamy disks of beeswax lined single wall while another section of floor held a depressed expanse of undulating wooden waves. through every part of visually seductive materials were shaped into configurations which indicateed natural elements and formations.

The mountain of glass, Avalanche (1998) paid deliberate homage to the nonsites of Robert Smithson in which piles of stones, salt and other materials were transported from industrially devastated landscapes to gallery settings. However, there are telling differences in result and intention between Smithson and Lin. While Lin shares her predecessor's fascination with the mode of buildings and processes of nature, she has not adopted his apocalyptic watch and rather than offer displacement of raw material from the "outside" world into the cultural frame of the exhibition space, She nears an idealization of natural form. Her installations are informed by the agency of her sense of beauty. Another significant difference is the relationship her work establishes with the viewer. While Smithson would bring the viewer into his work by dint of inserting small mirrors into his nonsites, Avalanche is essentially without human respect Movement alters one's perception, as the light picks on the outside shifting highlights, but an ambiguity of scale leaves the viewer's position in relation to the work uncertain.