Penland School of Crafts Campus Exhibits Four Installations in Conjunction with NCMA 0 - 60

On view simultaneously with the NCMA's exhibition are four temporary installations on the Penland campus. Dan Bailey, Kyoung Ae Cho, Alison Collins, and Anne Lemanski were commissioned by Penland and the NCMA to create these new works for 0 to 60. Each of these works were partially created at Penland where the artists gathered materials, worked in the studios, and did the final work of installation.

Opening events:

Friday, April 19, 8:00 PM, Northlight Building at Penland

Linda Dougherty, chief curator and curator of contemporary art at the NCMA, will present an overview of the project followed by slide presentations from each of the four installation artists.

Saturday, April 20, 1:30 PM, Pines Portico at Penland
Walking tour of the installations: Penland's director, Jean McLaughlin, will make some introductory remarks at the Pines Portico. and then each of the four artists will speak when the group visits their installation.

Information about the installations:    

Filmmaker, animator, and photographer Dan Bailey has created a two-part work using time-lapse and low-altitude aerial photography. Presented on a large monitor, Looking Up is a time-lapse witness of the slowly changing sky, offered to the viewer in silence. This piece allows us to engage with complex patterns and movements that we cannot process in real time. The vantage point is reversed in

Looking Down, a large printed wall piece that combines photographs made from low-altitude helium balloons with satellite imagery, maps, and the artist's personal history of place. In this collage of viewing angles, time shifts, and seasonal variances, an inconsistent and organic perspective undermines the technology and grounds the viewer in a distinctly human journey through the landscape.

Rust gathered from decaying steel sculptures-a remnant of her past creative endeavors-became the muse for Alison Collins' Temps Perdu. Combining that rust with soy milk to create a dye, Collins used a brush to transcribe sections of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) onto 300 yards of muslin. This cloth will be used, she says, "to protect or mummify the interior of the Dye Shed - walls, stairs, rafters, etc. - to preserve that forgotten space or the memory of its past with Proust's reconstruction of his past." Within that space she will install hundreds of muslin leaves, pinned together to create vines. On the leaves she has painted (also with the rust dye) text that refers to people and things she has lost. "The pins," she says, "act as a means of temporary connection-working as our memory does, resulting in a fragmentary collection of memories that seem to create a whole."

Anne Lemanski's Extirpated reflects the artist's interest in evolutionary time, and also presented her with the technical challenge of making a piece that can withstand the elements. The term "extirpated" refers to a species that once inhabited a region, but has since disappeared, with no hope of return. Lemanski's piece will create a series of clotheslines suspended between steel supports based on the form of Kentucky long rifles. Hanging from the lines will be silhouette images of species that have been extirpated from Mitchell County, where Penland is located: the American bison, the gray wolf, the North American porcupine, the snowshoe hare, the fisher, the Carolina parakeet, and the passenger pigeon. Placing images of these animals back into this environment creates a graphic reminder of how a landscape changes over time and points to the dichotomy of human admiration and exploitation of the animal world.

Kyoung Ae Cho begins each piece as a hunter-gatherer in search of organic matter or manufactured discards-a slow, deliberate process that sets the tone for her work. Shining Ground, Cho's installation at Penland, involves what she calls environmental processing and time-marking. She discovered mica-a flat, shiny mineral-while teaching at Penland in 2004. She gathered a bag of mica particles from a riverbed and kept it as a memory of "the gem" that was her Penland experience. Shining Ground incorporates that same collected material into vertical panels made of silk organza and pins, which will be prominently installed at the Northlight building. The piece is her attempt to recapture, many years later, the moment of quiet surprise when she first saw the ground covered with the sheen of mica sand.