| Feb. 5, 2010 | Posted by: MSLK |
Proposed Eco-Art Installations For Socrates Sculpture Park’s Spring Exhibit
This spring, Socrates Sculpture Park will be producing a show that seeks to examine the presence of nature within the fabric of urban life. We at MSLK are always looking for opportunities to create awareness on the impact of our mass consumption and have retooled our two eco-art installations to fit this bill. Since we believe in acting locally and thinking globally, we’re always thrilled when we get the opportunity to display our work in our own Long Island City community. Here are our two proposals:
2663 Urban Tumbleweeds
Socrates Sculpture Park was once an abandoned landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986. MSLK seeks to force viewers to question which came first: the trees or the trash? With the installation 2663 Tumbleweeds, we would encircle the root of the trees with a dense cluster of 2,663 plastic shopping bags, a number equal to 1 second of US consumption. The tree will show nature’s tenacity, emerging from the piles of trash created by man. Visitors can contemplate; “Are its roots nourished from trash? Is the landfill’s trash bubbling to the surface? What happens to our trash in landfills, does it ever really go away?”
Watershed
To show the endurance of plastic we also proposed to display our installation, Watershed. Here 1,500 plastic bottles, the number of disposable water bottles consumed in the US every second, come together to form a massive urban skyline, symbolically building a dark dystopia concealing the outlook over Socrates Sculpture Park’s Manhattan skyline.
Underneath the bottles we will plant fast-growing vines which during the summer will grow over the city of refuse. These vines display a hopeful future of nature prevailing over man-made waste, yet simultaneously revealing that the plastic by-products of our mass consumption still endure. By the end of the summer, the exhibition will be transformed into a wall of green plants encouraging visitors to repeatedly visit the park to follow the progress of the project.
In April we will be notified of the installations that will be exhibited at the park. Hopefully we will be among them!
Just let me know when you need help!
Just keep fighting the good fight, jonester.