Hoover Dam

H20 – Preview: Matthew Hebert

This post comes to you from Green Public Art

On May 6, 2011, H20: The Art of Conservation, at the Water Conservation Garden, San Diego, CA, will open to the public. Green Public Art reviewed over 1100 artists portfolios before inviting 14 San Diego artists to participate in the exhibition which offers San Diego homeowners an artistic alternative to incorporate water conservation into their own garden spaces. Green Public Art awarded each artist a mini-grant to develop their site-specific sculptures. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition opening the artist’s concepts will be revealed on this site. Questions? Contact Rebecca Ansert, Curator, Green Public Art at rebecca@greenpublicart.com.

CONCEPT: Special Deliveries is a series composed of three sculptures with solar powered mechanical peephole dioramas within. From the exterior each piece presents itself as a rural curbside mailbox mounted to a piece of plastic lumber and planted in a terracotta pot along with some cacti. The interiors feature unique dioramas depicting historic moments in various water reclamation projects of the western states. The viewer looks through a peephole and lowers the flag on the mailbox to activate the scene within. The pieces represent the construction of the Hoover Dam, the accidental creation of the Salton Sea, and the attack on the Los Angeles Aqueduct in Owens Valley.

ABOUT: Matthew Hebert creates work that deals with technology and its effect on the domestic environment and our sense of space. His work takes recognizable furniture forms and layers new forms of use and meaning into them. Ultimately, the work generates new forms of interaction between the object, environment, and the user. Matthew received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley; and his Master of fine Arts at California College of the Arts. He has taught at several schools including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, CalArts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Assistant Professor of Furniture at San Diego State University. 

Rebecca Ansert, founder of Green Public Art, is an art consultant who specializes in artist solicitation, artist selection, and public art project management for both private and public agencies. She is a graduate of the master’s degree program in Public Art Studies at the University of Southern California and has a unique interest in how art can demonstrate green processes or utilize green design theories and techniques in LEED certified buildings.

Green Public Art is a Los Angeles-based consultancy that was founded in 2009 in an effort to advance the conversation of public art’s role in green building. The consultancy specializes in public art project development and management, artist solicitation and selection, creative community involvement and knowledge of LEED building requirements. Green Public Art also works with emerging and mid-career studio artists to demystify the public art process. The consultancy acts as a resource for artists to receive one-on-one consultation before, during, and after applying for a public art project.

Go to Green Public Art

Land Arts of the American West

Apply: UNM IS NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR THE 2011 FALL PROGRAM.

Land Arts of the American West is an ongoing experiment in an interdisciplinary model for an Arts pedagogy based in place. The Land Arts program provides students with direct, physical engagement with a full range of human interventions in the landscape, from pre contact Native America architecture, rock paintings and petrogylphs to contemporary Earthworks, federal infrastructure, and the constructions of the US Military. Land art includes gestures both grand and small, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and track in the sand to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military/industrial projects such as hydroelectric dams, interstate highways, mines, and decommissioned airfields.

Each year the Land Arts program travels extensively throughout the southwestern United States and north central Mexico to live and work for over fifty days on the land. Our time is divided between investigating cultural sites such as Chaco Canyon, Roden Crater, Hoover Dam, Wendover Complex of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Juan Mata Ortiz, Spiral Jetty and the Very Large Array and working in the variety of eco-niches provided by our campsites at places such as the Grand Canyon, Grand Gulch, Gila Wilderness, Bosque del Apache and Otero Mesa Grasslands. Our current focus is on the issues of sustainability with a particular interest in food production and water use in the southwest.

Visit: The Land Arts of the American West student blog

HISTORY

Bill Gilbert started the Land Arts program in 2000 based on ten years of field programming at Acoma Pueblo and Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico. In 2000, John Wenger served as co-director contributing his experience of over 25 years in the wilderness of northern New Mexico and southeast Utah. Starting in 2002, the Land Arts program has developed as a collaboration between Gilbert and Chris Taylor. Professor Taylor currently directs the Land Arts program at Texas Tech University, http://landarts.arch.ttu.edu/. In 2005 and 2007, Erika Osborne co-directed the program in the field. In 2009 Catherine Harris joined the program as new faculty in the Art & Ecology area at UNM and Jeanette Hart-Mann (Land Arts program 2000) has assumed responsibility for the program field logistics.

BOOK

In 2009 the University of Texas Press published the book, Land Arts of the American West, presenting the ongoing collaboration in which artist Bill Gilbert and architect Chris Taylor investigate and create land art with their students. The book is organized around places visited over the first seven years of the program. The over 400 color photographs are accompanied by descriptive information about the site’s natural and human history; student journal entries presenting first-person experiences; essays by William L. Fox, Ann Reynolds, J.J. Brody, and Lucy Lippard; and interviews with Mary Lewis Garcia, Graciela Martinez de Gallegos and Hector Gallegos, and Matthew Coolidge. Woven throughout the text is a conversation amongst Gilbert, Taylor, and writer William L. Fox, covering the Land Arts program’s origins, pedagogic mission, field operations, interactions with guest lecturers, and future directions.