On Aug. 14, the Peninsula School of Art opened a memorable art exhibit titled "Eco-tivity: Environmental Art in Process." Three site-specific installations, constructed for the school's Guenzel Gallery, the front perimeter of the school's property and the water at PeninsulaState Park, brought international land artists to Fish Creek in Door County, Wis.
Each artwork impressively stands alone, a contemporary tribute to the "earth art" movement conceived in the '70s, frequently remembered by Robert Smithson's famous example, Spiral Jetty. Some historians might argue that the first land art actually began when ancient cultures constructed monumental structures using slave labor. Yet all these structures seek a similar purpose: allowing humanity to acknowledge the natural environment with esteem.
Bill McKee's installation in the school's Guenzel Gallery, titled Boundaries Are Only in the Mind of Men,appears as an army of overturned honeysuckle roots walking amid 15-foot-high stalks of Scotch pine. When strolling beneath the soaring tree height, one experiences the eerie atmosphere of being ambushed. Fast-growing and difficult to control, these invasive plant species crowd out Wisconsin's indigenous vegetation.
On the front property of the school, Karl Saliter commemorates relationships with his sculpture For Terri,an 8-by-8 stone and steel rebar cube. Saliter affixes native Lannon stone to a fabricated steel shell without any one stone touching another, creating a contrast with these impervious materials that allows for internal lighting to be added so the artwork radiates a warm glow. While referencing ancient monuments, the stone cube may honor the solidarity intrinsic to committed love, a portrayal of tension, tenacity and tenderness integrated into one primeval form.
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On the waters of PeninsulaState Park's TennisonBay, Dan Engelke creates an environmental water installation with approximately two-dozen identical sculptures titled Wood Wind. His thin, curved wooden shafts drift in the water. During the day, they fade into the bay environment, simulating ghost-like grass reeds echoing the land forests surrounding them. But at night, their white apparitions lit by solar-powered LED lights float and flicker along with their reflections in the secluded bay. Rhythmically swinging in the waves, the otherworldly installations beckon like lost spirits or sirens at sea. They call the observer to contemplate place, setting and time, above or below the water.
In each instance, this environmental art relates intimately to its landscape, an organic aesthetic that speaks with alluring and esoteric expression. These installations question the viewer's relationship to the land, both corporately and personally, for better or worse, inviting an intellectual and emotional response. This exhibit poetically asks, "Does mankind realize the full impact of his footprints on the Earth? Does he care?" The answers will determine future landscapes.
(The on-site exhibits continue until Sept. 26, the on-water installation until Aug. 28.)
