William Campbell Contemporary Art presents: Cliff Garten: Organic Geometries

by PegNews wire

William Campbell Contemporary Art, Inc. is pleased to present a solo show from Los Angeles-based artist Cliff Garten. Organic Geometries is a reconsideration of digitally generated three-dimensional models of Garten's sculptures and other selected natural forms.

The Avenue of Light commemorative print (edition of 20) represents the six iconic stainless steel sculptures spanning approximately 1/2 mile along Fort Worth's reclaimed historic Lancaster Avenue. The building of the Avenue of Light was a four year process involving sculpture, urban design and landscape architecture along with strong community input organized by the Fort Worth Public Art Program. The sculpture involved digital design and fabrication techniques as well as exacting craft in assembly and welding. The stainless steel sculptures that tower 36 feet are inspired by the nearby Texas & Pacific Terminal's Art Deco architecture that has been digitally manipulated and interpreted into stainless steel plates used to construct the pieces. The lines comprising the commemorative print are taken from digital fabrication drawings for the Avenue of Light sculptures. The commemorative print uses the "plan" view of the fabrication drawings, expands the thousands of lines of the digital drawing into a new two-dimensional image, exploiting the delicate line qualities and colors through digital manipulation of the sculptures.

Many of the prints in Organic Geometries are derived from working drawings of site specific sculptures created by Cliff Garten that are located across the United States. The first prints Garten made were taken from the digital drawing of a sculpture for the Interdisciplinary Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. The soaring sculpture titled Strings which has been installed in the length of the seven story atrium was based upon the columnar structure of an enzyme, the myosin-heavy-chain, a product of the research in the facility. Impressed by the line work of the digital drawings for fabrication of the sculptures Garten decided to manipulate and color the line work to create new images of exceptional depth and clarity. There are three of these large prints in the exhibition titled Strings, Column, A, B, and C. To Garten the organic quality of these prints were reminiscent of the illustrations of radiolarian (protozoan), by the eminent German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Garten has appropriated these images, redrawing Haeckel's two dimensional images as three dimensional digital models. Garten's prints exhibit the most precise balance of applied art and applied science, adding another layer of complexity to Haeckel's work. We look into these prints as into yet another three-dimensional realm, made possible by technologies that provide new ways of seeing.

The various sized edition of prints manifest as complex, layered, line work that depict contours or sections of digitally rendered three-dimensional forms. The sections sliced from the initial 3-D model are layered, alluding to the experience of the three-dimensional piece the sections were extracted from. While at once revealing themselves as an obvious rigorous digital system of line work, the work also refers to the hand drawn mathematical curves produced by the Spirograph, a geometric drawing toy introduced in the mid 1960's. This direct visual connection bridges the two vastly different technologies of work drawn by a system using the hand and work which is digitally conceived and rendered to reveal the possibilities of innovative technologies.

About the Artist

Cliff Garten received his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI as well as his Master of Landscape Architecture with distinction from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Cliff Garten is founder of Cliff Garten Studio in Venice, CA. Mr. Garten's practice integrates architecture, landscape and engineering as necessary means of positioning his sculpture in the public realm. His studio pursues public infrastructure as something that can perform in engaging and expressive ways, providing for our basic needs, as well as elevating itself to the status of sculpture. Cliff Garten Studio has over twenty years of experience in creating public artwork, integrated into public buildings, urban lighting, bridges, landscapes, site furniture, and public art plans that generate places for meaningful activity in the public realm and that point to a sustainable future. The studio has demonstrated its excellence in design and public art planning through a diversity of materials, methods and scale, in over 40 built projects in the U.S. and Canada that reveal the expressive potential of public places and infrastructure in the urban realm. Cliff Garten is the recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowships form the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Individual Artists, the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship and the Jerome Foundation Travelling Artist Grant. The American Society of Landscape Architects has cited many of this works for design excellence. He has served as a visiting critic at Harvard GSD, as well as UCLA School of Architecture, Otis Art Institute and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Mr. Garten lives and works in Los Angeles, where he continues his studio practice.

Source: William Campbell Contemporary Art