Four Exhibitions At Wave Hill

by Gordon Fitch

Some of you doubtless already know about Wave Hill. Hidden away in the northwestern corner of the Bronx, overlooking the Hudson from the highlands west of Van Cortlandt Park it was originally a country home and retreat for a succession of prominent New Yorkers. In 1960, it it was deeded over to the City of New York as a public garden and educational and cultural center. For more details on Wave Hill in general, see Wikipedia or Wave Hill's own web site.

Wave Hill is not just gardens and educational displays, however. It is also an art gallery, the Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery. This is the site of what Wave Hill calls an "In Response" series of installations. The gallery itself is almost 18th-century in the rational formality of its architecture and setting; this, and the complex formal gardens, lawns, rare and not-so-rare but noble trees, and natural areas outside its walls, are a foil against which artists are invited to play. This year there were six: Andrew Cooks, Maria Martinez-Cañas, Christian Nguyen, Milton Rosa-Ortiz, Christopher Russell, and Scherezade. Besides contructing their installations and showing their work, the artists appeared on certain dates and interact with gallery visitors,

Outdoors: Scherezade

The first work one notices coming to the gallery is not in the gallery but outside it. It consists of a number of drawings on waterproof fabric hung from a clear plexiglass structure. These blow in the wind like some sort of transcendental laundry. According to the gallery, the installation explores an interest in "the fragility and expectation associated with paradise." The ninety sheets are printed with images that represent a variety of subjects, merging the technological and utilitarian with the natural. These are overlaid with line drawings which interact with the prints underneath them. Scherezade was born in the Dominican Republic and now lives and teaches art in New York City; she studied at Parsons in New York and the Altos de Chavon School of Design in La Romana, DR.

North Gallery: Andrew Cooks

Andrew Cooks installed a series of paintings made with oil, pencil and gouache on layered paper titled A Blossoming (From Imagining The Garden). The paintings may be conceived of as a single painting, since its parts fit exactly into the large panels of the walls and were constructed with this particular room and environment in mind. The intent is clearly decorative and, since Wave Hill, Paris, and Shiraz are at about the same latitude and are all endowed with formal gardens of great repute, these are recalled in a light, horizonless space where objects and colors float in a free, lively insouciance. The objects depicted include the garden plan and portraits of various plants that live in it. Cooks lives and works in the New York City area; he was born and educated in Australia.

Central Room: Maria Martinez-Cañas

This work is called A Room for Eden (To Ana): Variation 1. Entering, we are at once in a much darker and more ominous space than the bright, decorative room we just left. The walls are covered with newsprint upon which images of a forest have been printed, all darkened with layers of beeswax. Curly willow branches reach out twisting from the forests on the walls. Through the windows, of course, one can see further trees and forests in the distance. I was reminded strongly of the delicious terrors of Joseph Cornell's Bébé Marie, but here we, the audience, are the bébés. In fact, backing a companion into the enclosing branches for a picture seemed to be a favorite photographic exercise for camera-endowed visitors. Martinez-Cañas was born in Havana, Cuba, and now lives in Miami, Florida. She exhibited a version of the present work in New York City in 2006.

Sunroom: Christian Nguyen

The works in this room were dominated by a huge and very complex drawing of an anonymous city of seemingly infinite size, set in an ambiguous landscape. Within the room were several sculptures which resembled sections taken out of the land -- a uniformly sand-colored land -- which formed a kind of mysterious furniture. The installation as a whole was titled Poliorcopolis. The artist was born in Vietnam, attended Cooper Union, and lives in Brooklyn.

Christopher Russell

While looking around the grounds at Wave Hill I was encouraged to see numerous bees at work, since I have been hearing a lot about their demise (which, if it occurs, will apparently be followed by ours, since we need them to pollinate many of our food plants. The pieces in this room are small sculptures made of white earthenware and covered with a yellow glaze which reminds us of pollen -- and indeed, many of the piece are representations of pollen, expanded from microscopic size to something one could hold in one's hand. Others depict bees and, in one case, "the birds and the bees". Russell began making architectural ceramics in 1991, first for himself and later for private clients. He demonstrated his sculpting technique on June 12, Wave Hill's hive inspection day. We can be glad someone is keeping a careful eye on the bees.

Sun Porch: Milton Rosa-Ortiz

This installation consists of glass beads, clear acrylic shards, clear monofilament line, and a support structure. Raised above eye level, the parts interact with the sun and the wind that enter the room through open windows, as it is clearly meant to. The wind moves the pieces, and they split the incoming light into innumerable moving reflections and refractions of themselves. Perhaps serendipitously, light moves as well up and down the monofilament lines which, crossing and recrossing, give rise to smooth patterns of vertical movement. One gets the impression of being at once underwater and within a gigantic flower. The flower part -- the red beads in the center -- are laid out with mathematic regularity, whereas the placement of the acrylic shards which surround it appears to be random except from certain angles, where a spiral appears. (In another work, Ross-Ortiz created a Marilyn Monroe made of similar red beads, so we may read them as portraying beauty, desire and perhaps the blood of tragedy as well.) The artist was born in Puerto Rico and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has had numerous exhibits in the New York City area and elsewhere.

Text of this article copyright © 2008 Gordon Fitch; copyright in all other images and objects belongs to their respective creators or owners.