You Can't Take It with You

The Schuylkill Center explores the transience of nature in "Ephemerality."

by Shaun Brady

Shadowlandscape, by Tatiana Ginsberg and Jenn Figg, video document

Watching Jenn Figg and Tatiana Ginsberg repeatedly lay out and then remove the shadow of a tree is like peeking backstage at nature, catching a glimpse of the invisible stagehands who keep the planet's processes in motion.

Shadowlandscape (pictured) is a video document, a stutter-stop animation edited together from 8,000 stills, of the collaborators creating a tree's shadow out of scraps of handmade paper. The white "branches" creep across the empty field and then disappear, raked away, leaving no trace. The Schuylkill Center shows no evidence that this work, or the six other pieces created for the new exhibit "Ephemerality," ever existed along its trails. 

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Most outdoor art installations are built with permanence in mind, the point being to work with materials that can stand the ravages of time and weather. In curating "Ephemerality," Zoë Cohen had the opposite in mind. She asked the artists to create a piece of work on the grounds within a 24-hour time frame using natural materials.

"For this exhibition, I wanted artists to have a chance to do site-specific work without the constraints of having to create something lasting," Cohen explains. "Part of the mission here is to connect people to the importance of natural space and native species, the original qualities of the land before it became urbanized. This exhibition is in part an opportunity to invite artists to have a creative response to the land."

Some of the artists chose to address the show's topic in content as well as in fact. Nancy Agati traced the movement of water in the Wind Dance Pond in vines, then cast them back onto the surface to float away, the ephemeral becoming concrete and back again. Matt Pych's Forever Lasts a Day consists of four words — forever, infinite, fixed, endless — written in dead leaves on the ground, the longevity of their definitions contrasted by the fact that even in photographs their fragility is evident, threatened by the next breeze or rainfall. The photographs of Sarah Nicole Phillips' Human Hugger glimpse those words, formed on trees with leaves, from different approaches, readable only from a single perspective.

Torkwase Dyson opted to use the setting for a performance-based, sociological piece. Grass Stains depicts the African-American artist crawling on the ground in an impeccable white suit. Two photographs of the soiled outfit beg the question of the implied purity of "whiteness" given the results of contact with the natural world.

Others chose to respond directly to the environment. Claudia Sbrissa simply arrived at daybreak on the winter solstice, eventually forming a circular whorl of green pine needles set against the dead, brown floor of the Pine Plantation, a stop on one of the center's many hiking trails. Theresa Rose curated a show within the show, inviting a different artist to arrive for each of the 24 hours and create a small piece, which range from photographs to natural mobiles to a dirt-filled jar.

For Figg and Ginsberg, the concept of the show resonated with some of their own concerns. "In our work, both of us dealt with fantasyscapes or imaginary landscapes," Ginsberg says. "I work a lot with natural dyes and materials that are environmentally sensitive, things that can last for a very long time but that people tend to think of as ephemeral. So I'm really interested in experiences that you can't take with you, that are transformative of a space."

The only idea the two had of the Schuylkill Center prior to the creation of the piece came from Cohen's photos and shots on Google Earth. So while they had their basic concept in mind, much still was left to chance.

"Once we had pictures of the site, our ideas could become more concretized, but only about what we might do. It was so much about how we approached the place and the moment. There were all of these variables that really were out of our control: Would it be sunny, in which case the shadows and the light would be different? What if it was raining, or if it was very windy?"

As an artist, Cohen has created her own ephemeral works in sand and snow, and in a way this exhibition allowed her to share that experience. "It's an almost playful, childlike process," she says, "but with a little more intention behind it. With this exhibition I'm offering this land as a place for people to try that."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

"Ephemerality" runs through April 12, free, Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, 8480 Hagy's Mill Road, 215-482-7300, schuylkillcenter.org.