PREVIOUSLY IN THE PROJECT SPACE
Felled: Artist Unknown
The Project Space at the Wright features “Felled: Artist Unknown,” inspired by the discovery of a dead Douglas fir in the woods near Pecos, NM. The tree was more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter and had been toppled by a chainsaw and left up on the felling hinge and lower limbs so that it skims the steep terrain, leaving space between tree and earth. The limbs on the upper surface were removed and stairs carved in with removed chunks left fallen along the hill.
“The work pleasingly juxtaposes a strong architectural form with the complexity of untouched nature,” notes curator Hannah Hughes. “The stairs allow one to slightly hover above the wilds, to traverse and view them with ease from a paradigmatic human perspective, achieved by power of abstraction. They are a material inquiry into the roots of transcendence, literally ‘climbing beyond.’”
The Project Space offers an installation in three different mediums as tribute to this anonymous gift of land art—a video projection, a sculptural arrangement from cut wood remnants and a US Geological Survey topo map with the site location marked.
As a Way of Starting Again: Ira Wright’s Notebooks
This installation of 80-plus drawings from Wright’s notebooks offers a privileged candid view into a theatre of the mind revealing itself with wit and sensitivity. “The nervous system flows into a vast repertoire of marks in which projects are outlined, feelings purged, obsessions limned, and trivia jotted down,” says Project Space curator Hannah Hughes. “Mastery of academic life drawing, commercial-art techniques, and art history underlies even an apparent scribble. However, the notebooks are not intended as grand statements for bright lights and strange eyes. Instead they appear as an un-ending search, maybe unresolved or inscrutable, but questing, always questing.”
Also on hand are the artist’s self-published literary works, which include novels, memoirs, and an opera, all presented in casual notebook form.
