Land Art in the Weston
While most of Thin Air Studio's work displays outdoors, their current installation returns to an indoor setting at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts. It fills most of the spacious street level of the gallery. It rises nearly forty feet high, reaches down to the lower level of the gallery, and undulates, in dramatic horizontal curves, throughout the length of the exhibition space.
The artists of Thin Air Studio, Christopher S. Daniel and Kirk Mayhew (and, until recently, Richard Fruth), have been building site-specific installations in Greater Cincinnati and elsewhere since 2002. During the two weeks of this particular assemblage, a flatbed truck piled high with branches pulled up on 7th Street. Daniel, Mayhew and about six other sweaty artists hauled branches into the gallery. The materials were found floating on the Ohio River, once dead but now alive again.
I questioned the artists about these materials. "We try to collect wood that doesn't have any bark on it," Daniel told me. "Most of the wood, by the time it has floated down from Pennsylvania has the bark stripped off. Though a little bit waterlogged, they are bone hard and really strong." Daniel says it is important to find branches that aren't rotten or infested with bugs.
"We pick pieces because of their personality, and what we need," Mayhew added. "We had to go back and search for a bunch of arched pieces because we ran out. "
Daniel and Mayhew often use such degradable materials with the expectation that their outdoor sculptures are impermanent. Sidewinder (2006) was able to withstand the elements for two years before it began to wear down extensively outside the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington. The work was originally slated for just two months, but the Carnegie decided to keep it for as long as it would last. The exception to this impermanent approach is Tidal at the Iris Café in Over-the-Rhine; the branches are coated in polyurethane.
This close attention to the environment has roots in the Arts and Crafts movement and the Prairie School of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright built his home in Oak Park, Chicago with the natural landscape in mind. In one hallway of the house, a tree branch actually cuts right through the wall, because Wright did not want to trim back the tree.
Thin Air Studio also follows in the tradition of the Land Art movement of the 1970s. The movement rejected the idea of displaying work in a museum. Artwork was made for the outdoors and was closely, even inextricably linked to the environment, as per its name. The artistic challenge became making work in harmony with a particular environment, confronting its beauty and constraints. The natural world was hence a co-author in the composition. Consider The Lightning Field (1977) by Walter De Maria, in which 400 stainless steel posts light up during a thunder storm. Mother-nature can also be a continuous force at work on the sculpture as in the case of the Great Salt Lake and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), now whitened by salt deposits.
"If there is already a walkway we want to make sure not to interrupt that but to help people negotiate or make it part of their path," Mayhew explains. Many of Thin Air's outdoor sculptures allow people to walk or navigate through them with a wheelchair or stroller. "Sometimes we'll leave an archway to show off a window or a door. Rather than blocking a view, we want to show off that area and isolate it. In the midst of that kind of movement, we can direct their attention elsewhere. We want to build the piece around something that was in that location."
Before they ever begin building, there is careful planning, often via photos of the location; for this newest installation Dennis Harrington provided them with a model of the space. With it they were able to map out the construction using twigs. The finished installation is well in keeping with the model yet still reveals creative in-process variation from both the artists as well as their assistants.
Such assistance and creative input of crew members and volunteers is an important component to their public sculptures. It gives the community ownership and expression. Daniel says this is another way of educating the public and it gives them a new perspective on the arts. They have worked with the students of Waldorf School, built sculpture with volunteers at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey and have taken their work as far as Munich, Germany.
While the work is broad reaching and vested in the community, it is also playful. Daniel and Mayhew have fun working 12 to14 hour days to install their work. "A lot of people see this and ask, "You guys build forts, you building tree houses? Their view on what is art is two-dimensional stuff or things made out of caste bronze," says Daniel. Yet at the end of the day they are more than willing to call themselves just a couple of kids building forts.
