Nasher XChange
a digital guide
Ugo Rondinone is designing a wooden pier, finished in vibrant colors, for Fish Trap Lake in West Dallas. Rondinone, who grew up near a lake in Switzerland, is interested in experiences unique to a pier. He describes how the artwork can encourage poetic, romantic, and contemplative moments simply by offering a chance for visitors to transition from land to water by walking the length of the structure. The pier will face west so that visitors can experience sunset with the intense colors of the sky reflected on the surface of the water around them.
Fish Trap Lake is a small body of water on a 30-acre site owned by the Dallas Housing Authority, and located just minutes from downtown Dallas. It is surrounded by several schools, a YMCA, a Girls Inc. of Metropolitan Dallas location, a Dallas Public Library branch, and a senior living community. The site was part of La Reunion, a utopian community of French, Belgian, and Swiss settlers founded in the 1850s. The lake and adjacent cemetery are named for the fishing technique used by the colony in the nearby Trinity River. In the early 1900s, the site was a sand and gravel pit and was later used for drainage control of storm water. The lake, as it is seen today, was filled in with water redirected from the Trinity.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Ruben Ochoa has created a unique body of work that transforms common materials into breathtaking sculptures. For this commission, Ochoa is responding to the origins of the Trinity River Audubon Center as an illegal dump site in Southeast Dallas, which now serves as a beautiful nature center at the edge of the largest urban hardwood forest in the United States. Ochoa has proposed installing a group of concrete and steel sculptures derived from post footings in chain link fences rising from the ground.
In conversation with Brancusi's Bird in Space, he envisions his installation as man-made forms morphing into organic movement, reminiscent of a flock of birds. By evoking the site's change from urban dumping ground to place of scenic beauty, Ochoa's work reflects the malleability and resiliency of nature. A primary theme in Ochoa's work has been the exploration of the ideas of inclusion and exclusion throughout urban areas and how class and labor have been contextually impacted and neglected by the built environment. He uses materials and objects that could be seen to signify demarcation in urban spaces, such as galvanized fence poles, concrete retaining walls, and wooden pallets, and then extrapolates them from their original context to shift their meaning for viewers. This will be Ochoa's first sculpture commissioned for the public realm.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Black & Blue, Cultural Oasis in the Hills celebrates Bishop College's role in the intellectual and cultural life of Dallas through a series of historical markers commemorating important people and moments from the college, and which will also include an interactive web component and video interviews.
Bishop College was a historically black college founded in Marshall, Texas in 1881 that moved to southern Dallas in 1961 and closed in 1988. The campus is now occupied by Paul Quinn College. To develop her project, Vicki Meek is working with former Bishop College faculty and alumni, and members of the Highland Hills and Singing Hills neighborhoods around the school. Bishop College played a significant role in the development of academic and cultural life in Dallas, giving birth to important cultural institutions such as the African American Museum and the Dallas Black Dance Theatre. She describes the motivation behind her work as a desire "to reclaim African American history, restore our collective memory and illuminate critical issues affecting the Black community through visual communication."
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Rick Lowe's social sculpture is planned for the Vickery Meadow neighborhood, a three square-mile area that makes up one of the most culturally diverse sections of Dallas. The project, entitled Trans.lation, will kick off a series of Pop-up Markets open to the public on October 19, November 23, December 21, January 18, and February 22 that will enable the Vickery Meadow community to share their artistic talents and cultural traditions with each other and the greater Dallas community. Lowe is working with an eclectic group of artists, community organizers, designers, and residents to highlight and translate the cultural diversity of Vickery Meadow as an asset.
Through a series of workshops and gatherings with residents, Lowe and the Trans.lation team are identifying residents' creative strengths and connecting them with local artists for collaboration and mentorship to ultimately engender opportunity and entrepreneurship. Trans.lation will facilitate a new vision of what public space and interaction could look like in Vickery Meadow. Lowe has visited Dallas multiple times to hold community meetings with residents and property owners, who have shared an overwhelming desire to feel more connected to each other and to the city of Dallas, outside of Vickery Meadow. Lowe considers the research process by which he connects with and learns about a community to be an integral part of his art. As many as 27 languages are spoken by almost 30,000 people in this small but diverse neighborhood. Refugees from around the world, including several Asian and African countries, are settled in the area by organizations such as the International Rescue Committee, Refugee Services of Texas and the resettlement services of the Catholic Charities of Dallas.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Long's project, Fountainhead, is a irresistible contribution to the tradition of artist-made fountains. Relying more heavily on technology than anything Long has produced thus far, the installation performs every function of a traditional fountain, only virtually.
Projected images of sheets of dollar bills move serenely over the surface of a sculpted, head-like form, flowing like water, instantly adapting to every nook and curve, accompanied by an elegant soundtrack of moving water and paper. Three kiosks topped with iPads surround the form and offer an opportunity for visitors to donate money to one of three Dallas charities: Bookmarks, a branch of the Dallas Library, Dallas CASA and the North Texas Food Bank. After payment is tendered, visitors are encouraged to flick a virtual coin on the iPad screen toward the form, resulting in an exuberant splash.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Larner's piece, Xsculpture, a mirrored stainless steel sculpture, will be installed in a courtyard at the new University of Texas at Dallas' Edith O'Donnell Arts and Technology building (ATEC), serving as a symbol for the exchange of ideas. ATEC is a new interdisciplinary curriculum at UT Dallas that fosters collaboration at the intersection of arts and humanities, science and engineering and is a partnership between the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Arts and Humanities.
The innovative X-shape of the sculpture, described by the artist as continuing "my investigation into the open form and the use of line to create volume," has been developed over several years and could not have been realized without the use of digital modeling technology. Larner has relied heavily on technology in the past, as with 2001, a Public Art Fund commission, that used 3-dimensional animation programs and computer modeling to create intersecting cubical and spherical forms, and a hyper-iridescent paint made up of laser-cut particles, applied in a smooth coat with automotive spraying methods. Her experience working both with and without technology intrigued faculty at UT Dallas, and made this pairing a natural fit as the program progresses through its first year.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Jaar's project is inspired by what it means for a museum to celebrate an anniversary: what does it mean to be born, grow, and then reflect back on ten years of life? Most importantly, how can an institution like the Nasher Sculpture Center acknowledge the community it is a part of? Instead of reflecting on important institutional moments, Jaar intends to celebrate the births of newborn citizens and the limitless possibilities of their futures.
Inside a pavilion designed by Jaar and located in the Nasher garden, visitors will hear recordings of the first cries of babies born in Dallas between October 1, 2013 and February 1, 2014. In collaboration with Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, Methodist Dallas Medical Center and Parkland Health & Hospital System, the sounds of the first few seconds of life will be recorded and uploaded in the pavilion. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the time-stamped recordings will repeat and new recordings will be added continuously allowing for a space inside the museum where the voices of the city can be heard. For the hundreds of families who choose to become a part of this artwork, the Nasher Sculpture Center will provide special memberships to the museum - a one-year Giacometti Level Membership for the participating families and the first ever Lifetime Membership for the babies.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
On a visit to Dallas City Hall, Harrison was surprised to see Henry Moore's The Dallas Piece surrounded by metal barricades much like a museum or gallery would place stanchions around an artwork.
This experience triggered an idea of developing a project for the plaza that would encourage visitors to be more engaged with the artwork as Moore had intended. Although the barricades have been removed, most visitors to the plaza still walk around the sculpture, rather than through it. Harrison is designing a bright form for the monochrome plaza that will be placed next to the Moore and point to "what is already there." Harrison's XChange project represents her first public art commission.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Good/Bad Art Collective is a Denton, Texas based group of artists that created well over 250 events in Texas and New York from 1993-2001. For the Nasher XChange exhibition, the Good/Bad Art Collective is creating a project entitled Curtains that will be part one-night event, part exhibition and part television broadcast exploring notions of viewership and interaction. The Collective's XChange project will be their first major project in more than 10 years, and coincides with the 20th anniversary of the group.
In the months leading up to the opening of XChange, the Collective will produce a 28-minute infomercial, which will be filmed in a newly created television studio on an empty floor of Bryan Tower, a downtown Dallas highrise managed by Spire Realty Group LP. At the opening event on Saturday, October 19, 2013, attendees will be given the opportunity to participate in the filming of the infomercial. Visitors throughout the run of XChange will be able to walk the space in which the infomercial was filmed and see sculptural elements used as props during the opening and in the finished infomercial, as well as select edits of video documenting the one-night event. The finished infomercial will be broadcast on late night and early morning television timeslots in local, regional, and national markets.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
Almarcegui's project for Nasher XChange, entitled Buried House, involves working with Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity on a house in Southeast Dallas already slated for demolition. After the demolition is finished, she will bury the house's remains on the property, creating a sort of memorial site that nonetheless retains the buildings actual substance and providing a "free space" for reflection on the neighborhood's past, present and future. Almarcegui is working in Oak Cliff Gardens, a neighborhood in East Oak Cliff, part of an area with a history almost as old as Dallas itself.
Near the site of the first stop for stagecoaches headed out of Dallas for Central Texas, the area surrounding the intersection at Lancaster and Ann Arbor roads became the small town of Lisbon, which was in turn annexed by the city in 1929. Today, Oak Cliff Gardens is a neighborhood in transition. Many derelict, often vacant, homes will undergo renovations, thanks to the help of organizations such as Habitat for Humanity. These wastelands in the neighborhood embody a significant historical moment-a time of possibility when anything might happen. Almarcegui hopes to draw attention to this area and make people in Dallas aware of its rich and varied character, much of it already consigned to the past, before it is changed forever. "This project is a sculptural work that is about the construction that used to stand, the history of the house and how it was erected," said artist Lara Almarcegui. "However, it's not just about the house, but about the past of the terrain and the future of the terrain. It is a work about construction and urban development," said Almarcegui.
Text and Images: Nasher Sculpture Center
