Andy Goldsworthy, Artist

The artist uses nature in the area. 

No adhesives or wire or any other materials are brought in.

This is a small sampling of work. 

Google artist's name for a plethora of images. 

 

Sarah Nance, Artist

faced, 2013
recovered stones, foil tape, glass microspheres, natural light
dimensions variable

faced, 2013 (detail)
recovered stones, foil tape, glass microspheres, natural light
dimensions variable

buoy for those between the spray and sky, 2013
mirrors, glass microspheres, concrete, spray paint, natural light
4.5 x 47.5 x 47.5 in.

Skagaströnd, Iceland

a line, the infinite, 2014
sand, natural light
1 in.

marking time in light, 2014 (detail)
reflective fabric tape, found stones, natural light
8.5 x 1.5 x 1494 in.

Alvord Desert, Eastern Oregon

marking time in light, 2014
reflective fabric tape, found stones, natural light
8.5 x 1.5 x 1494 in.
image credit | Ian Clark

sarahnance.com

Experiential Art Student Work, Instructor Arran Jackson

Source link here. 

Hansel and Gretal

Hansel and Gretel are young children whose father is a woodcutter. When a great famine settles over the land, the woodcutter's abusive second wife decides to take the children into the woods and leave them there to be by themselves, so that she and her husband will not starve to death because the children eat too much. The woodcutter opposes the plan but finally and reluctantly submits to his wife's scheme. They are unaware that in the children's bedroom, Hansel and Gretel have overheard them. After the parents have gone to bed, Hansel sneaks out of the house and gathers as many white pebbles as he can, then returns to his room, reassuring Gretel that God will not forsake them.

The next day, the family walks deep into the woods and Hansel lays a trail of white pebbles. After their parents abandon them, the children wait for the moon to rise and then they follow the pebbles back home. They return home safely, much to their stepmother's horror. Once again provisions become scarce and the stepmother angrily orders her husband to take the children farther into the woods and leave them there to die. Hansel and Gretel attempt to gather more pebbles, but find the doors locked and find it impossible to escape from their house.

Illustration by Ludwig Richter, 1842

The following morning, the family treks into the woods. Hansel takes a slice of bread and leaves a trail of bread crumbs to follow home. However, after they are once again abandoned, the children find that birds have eaten the crumbs and they are lost in the woods. After days of wandering, they follow a beautiful white bird to a clearing in the woods and discover a large cottage built of gingerbread and cakes, with window panes of clear sugar. Hungry and tired, the children begin to eat the rooftop of the candy house, when the door opens and a "very old woman" emerges and lures them inside, with the promise of soft beds and delicious food. They comply, unaware that their hostess is a wicked witch who waylays children to cook and eat them.

Text and image source from Wikipedia

Ana Mendieta, Artist

Tree of Life, 1976

"Mendieta’s work is both beautiful and haunting as it draws on the life long pain the artist experienced after being ripped from her Cuban homeland as a young orphan. Mendieta’s insatiable desire to reconnect with her motherland runs though her work and seems to almost give each piece a heart and a soul of its own. This connection with the earth is reflected in her choice of materials which included flowers, grass, soil, rock, gunpowder and fire. Unconcerned with the monetary value or collectibility of her work Mendieta would often create pieces which lasted mere minutes, or even seconds as was the case with her ‘sculptures in the sky’ made from smoke. As a result many pieces exist only as photographic records and a fair portion of the exhibition is devoted to displaying the extensive body of photographs and records that she kept of her works and performance pieces."

Above image and text source link here.

Source link here.

Above two images from huffingtonpost.com

Francesca Woodman, Artist

"Taken between 1972 and 1981, Woodman’s photographs are almost all black-and-white and have a general softness of focus not often seen these days. They depict a world almost identical to the one captured by earlier generations of photographers, as if Woodman’s camera were a filter through which the neon clutter of contemporary life could not pass. Some of these images have the polished smoothness of Surrealist photographs, like those of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer, in which precisely-rendered objects are arranged so deliberately it seems the slightest movement would alter the meaning entirely. (Fluent in Italian, Woodman spent her junior year in Rome, where she paid frequent visits to the Libreria Maldoror, a bookshop-gallery that specialized in work about and by Surrealists, and which ultimately hosted her first small show.) She makes use of many Surrealist motifs, among them mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls. Like Magritte, she often shrouds her subjects in white sheets."

Image and text source from The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman by Elizabeth Gumport, The New York Review of Books.  Link here to read and see more. 

Francis Alys, Artist

Sometime Making Something Leads To Nothing

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian contemporary artist living in Mexico City. Above are stills from the short movie Paradox of Praxis 1, where Alÿs pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts; serving as a way to mark time and measure existence.

Zapatos Magneticos

Walking, shoes with magnets

Cuentos Patrioticos


Artist's website.  Link here. 

William Pope. L, Artist

Link here for an interview with William Pope. L

William Pope.L

by Nick Stillman

The Great White Way
Fulton Street to Reade Street, Manhattan

The socio-economic implications of Broadway are enormous, and examining what Broadway "represents" is the first key to making some sense of William Pope.L’s complex, ongoing street performance The Great White Way. Stretching from Manhattan’s southern tip all the way up the island, Broadway is the borough’s longest street. It’s also a signifier of distant dreams, lavish wealth, and commodity fetishism. It’s the passageway along which major financial transactions occur— the ebbs and flows of the stock market, lavish shopping expenditures, astronomical real estate sales, and of course, the wheelings and dealings of commercial art galleries.

But William Pope.L’s Broadway is an entirely different beast: one of despair, desperation, and degradation. Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has been infecting the streets of New York with periodic street performances, reminders that the country, city, and culture he lives in have a long way to go before the discomforts of race and stereotyping have safely receded. Pope.L works as a writer and visual artist (his terrifically stinky peanut butter painting was included in Ronald Feldman Gallery’s recent survey of new American art Ameri©an Dre@m), but it’s his performances that have gained him notoriety and caused sensation. He has poured Thunderbird wine over himself while sitting peacefully on a West Broadway sidewalk; he has publicly munched on the Wall Street Journal while sitting on an American flag; and he has tied himself to a Chase bank with a link of sausages, wearing only workboots and a skirt made of dollar bills, trying to hand out free money to the bank’s customers. A spectacle, yes, but a thought-provoking one. Still, none of these actions have gained Pope.L the same level of public attention as his crawls, in which he dresses up in various costumes and slowly drags his limp body along city sidewalks.

The Great White Way is Pope.L’s masterwork-in-progress. For this piece, he plans to traverse Broadway’s 22 miles via painstakingly slow and rigorous crawling over the course of five years. This appropriately began at the Statue of Liberty, from which he took a ferry to the Financial District. From there, the inching up Broadway (which is uphill for a while) began. You can take your pick of the symbols relevant to Pope.L’s Broadway. Within the Financial District, one of the first that seems relevant is a large sculpture of a staggering bull, prominently located on a small island in the middle of the street. The reminder here, in the context of Pope.L’s crawl, is multifarious. This bull, tamed by man and his surrounding culture of money-making, resonates nicely with Pope.L’s concurrent battle: a man battling not just nature, but outcast status among his own species as he crawls pathetically along the dirty, heavily populated street. American flags are everywhere down here in Trade Center territory, but Pope.L (when in character, anyway) joins the class most Americans prefer not to think about.

For this installment of The Great White Way, Pope.L began at Fulton Street and called it quits at Reade Street, about six blocks. He doesn’t set parameters on how long the crawl will last, he just goes until he can’t go anymore. And he tends not to go too far, since he insists on pulling himself along in the most laborious way possible, using only his elbows and knees. He wore a Superman suit and gloves, and strapped a skateboard (with a Superman logo on it) to his back with bungee cords, so as to cross streets expediently. Pope.L was flanked by a cameraman and a photographer, with a few in-the-know enthusiasts milling around. It was cold and windy and had rained hard the day before, filling the sidewalk’s convex pools with dirty water. The crawling is by no means fast or focused— this is not a sporting event— and without the small crowd of followers, Pope.L would probably be construed as an insane homeless man. After all, he’s not only wearing a Superman getup with a skateboard strapped to his back and dragging himself through puddles, he’s also black, like most of the other homeless men in the area. He crawled with seeming oblivion through the puddles, and stopped to breathe heavily, to grunt plaintively, and to wring out his sopping gloves. Pedestrians acted exactly as you would assume they would to a black man crawling on the sidewalk wearing a Superman suit: some with total indifference, some with open staring and laughter, a much safer reaction given the cameraman and the small crowd of followers watching his every move.

There’s an impulse to criticize Pope.L for hiring a cameraman to document the crawl so closely and obviously. Both the psychological influence on and response from spectators is potentially diluted by the realization that they’re seeing something planned, some type of theater, something that’s safe to stare and laugh at. If part of Pope.L’s objective is to make people confront something they don’t want to, he’s offering them a mechanism to subvert the psychologically prying dart he’s aiming at them. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley are two other artists who have explored similar psychologically affecting themes like violence, grotesquerie, and humiliation. But their videos and performances have always had an art world connotation. By bringing his performances to the streets, minus the hanging-on and hullabaloo of the art world, Pope.L promises the potential to connect directly with pedestrians, who would have no idea what they’re seeing is considered "art." But in the current format of The Great White Way, the crowds and camera signify it’s okay to gawk.

After all, the crawls are, I think, the most earnest element in Pope.L’s diverse oeuvre. While all of his work calls attention to the paradoxes of race and, more specifically, what it means to be a black man, he also tends to add a pinch of the absurd or hilarious to the cauldron, and it works. His art is accessible and exciting (check out his website, www.distributingmartin.com). It addresses sticky ideas without preaching. And in the case of The Great White Way, the Superman suit is that element of humor. But there’s nothing funny about a potentially crazy man laboriously pulling himself along a sidewalk. It conjures the concept of escape. There’s the obvious migratory aspect of Pope.L’s crawl, the notion of the impossibility of escaping your own skin or class, the pedestrian’s challenge of how to escape the impulse to stereotype. When at his best, he makes you confront what you’d rather not.

But sometimes it’s the camera itself that causes the type of confrontation and dialogue Pope.L seems to be encouraging. Consider Tompkins Square Crawl in 1991. Pope.L set out to crawl through the East Village’s Tompkins Square in a sharp black suit, holding a small flowerpot containing a blooming flower. A white cameraman documented the performance, immediately attracting a black pedestrian, irate at the thought that this white man was exploiting a black man’s humiliation. Then, after a cursory explanation, he became more irate when he interpreted Pope.L’s donning of a fashionable suit as a slight to his own integration into business society. "I wear a suit like that to work!" he cried. Race, class, and gender politics are all well-trod fields in recent gallery art— to the point where a lot of it feels derivative and tired. But the ability to prompt such emotion and resultant dialogue on the topic make Pope.L by far the most exciting and relevant artist working in the field of identity politics today. -source is The Brooklyn Rail.  Link here.

Michael Heizer, Artist

Circular Planar Displacement Drawing,
made with a motorcycle and to be erased by first rain. c.1970

Anne Bevan, Artist

"The shining silver shape of Moon Poolon the forest floor looks quite out of place. It stands out because of its colour and its materials, which contrast with the forest’s natural tones and textures. The artist has tried to achieve a cold and silvery appearance in the work with the ripples on the surface. As the title suggests, the sculpture sparkles like a water pool reflected by the moon. The idea of a moonlit pool in the middle of a forest brings to mind ideas of ancient myths, magic and folklore associated with the woods.  This artwork has been developed in response to its chosen site. The artist knows that the pool will respond to and change with nature and particularly the natural light as it changes from morning through day until night, which may be pitch black or even moonlit.  Anne also likes to questions the role of public sculpture within such a context.  She thinks about how people will respond to it. It's as though it tells its own ancient folk tale and people can become a part of the story by walking on it and around it.The artist has also considered the site of the artwork and its proximity to the sea and the nearby offshore oil industry. From the forest floor you can regularly see and hear helicopters fly overhead on their way to the oilrigs. Another interesting association is that 'moon pool' is the name used to describe the space in an oil platform where divers are lowered into the sea."

Image and text source is Education Scotland.  Link here to see more work by this artist and others. 

Donald Urquhart, Artist

An Enlightened Stand is a site-specific work (ie made for that exact place), appearing amongst the trees like a painting of the shadows cast in the striking sunlight.  The lighter, square shape on the ground is similar to the canvas support of a painting.  It is as if Urquhart has captured a moment in time almost like a photograph.  There is also a seemingly simple underlying geometry suggested in the work.

Donald Urquhart’s work is usually conceptual, meaning that the ideas behind the work are more important than the materials. In this case the shadows run south of each tree, as if the sun was in the north – the opposite of reality.  Urquhart is interested in fusing political ideas with a passion for the environment and the use of natural materials that grow and change with the seasons. 

In this case, natural light, the strong colour of the trees and the marble-white layer that Urquhart introduces all intermingle. The sensation varies depending on the time of day and the weather conditions.

Donald Urquhart’s artistic practice involves working with the environmental space to create permanent outdoor installations using natural materials to define colours, shapes and forms. 

 The artist has ‘painted’ an effective visual image of trees casting long shadows. To create the square on the ground he removed 42 tons of earth and replaced it with 30 tons of white Dolomite marble chips.

Image and text source from Education Scotland.  Link here to see more images and other artists. 

Richard Long, Artist

RIVER PO LINE

ITALY  2001

DUSTY BOOTS LINE

THE SAHARA  1988

BRUSHED PATH  A LINE IN NEPAL

A 21 DAY FOOTPATH WALK 1983

A LINE MADE BY WALKING

ENGLAND 1967

MAHALAKSHMI HILL LINE

WARLI TRIBAL LAND  MAHARASHTRA

INDIA 2003

More to see on artist's website.  Link here.