LandMark
LandMark
Various Parks in Lakewood and Arvada
See https://www.landmarkexhibit.org/ for addresses
Curated by Anna Kaye and Kalliopi Monoyios
April 17-October 18, 2021
Review by Jillian Blackwell
If your pandemic life is missing a bit of adventure, pack yourself some sunscreen, a water bottle, and maybe some snacks, and embark on Lakewood’s sculpture scavenger hunt. LandMark is an outdoor art exhibition installed across various parks in Lakewood. Each piece is presented with a QR code, which the viewer can scan to listen to a short explanation from the artist. The works speak to their specific location—the pedestrian green spaces of Lakewood—but also to the global implications of how humans interact with the natural world. Some seek to draw attention to the beauty of natural forms, like Nicole Banowetz’s Respire. Others are a more direct critique of humans’ involvement in climate change, like Tiffany Matheson’s Caught. With ten sculptures dispersed over seven parks, the exhibition can easily fly under the radar. [1] However, as with inspection of the natural world, if one takes the time to stop and investigate, LandMark holds much to discover.
Mia Mulvey, Albedo, ceramic, pigment and, wood. On view at Coyote Gulch Park, 2501 S. Gladiola Way, Lakewood, CO 80228. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Albedo by Mia Mulvey is tucked innocuously next to the playground at Coyote Gulch Park, 2501 S. Gladiola Way. The ceramic sculpture is a curving, bulbous form that rests on top of two wooden pallets. It is uninitimidating and pleasantly adapts and blends into its setting. The glassy blues and chalky whites of the sculpture repeat the blues and whites of the slides and swings nearby. Mulvey’s audio clip gives the sculpture depth and weight, tying the form to the melting of glacial ice and to albedo—the amount of light that is reflected or absorbed by a surface, and the title of the work. [2]
The blob-like form is actually based on a 3D scan Mulvey took of glacial ice in the Arctic Circle. The white color is a clay slurry layered over a blue glaze. While the sculpture sits outdoors, the elements are slowly washing off this slurry, exposing more and more of the blue underneath. [3] This process mimics the change in albedo that melting glaciers experience. As park-goers return regularly to the park, they will see the sculpture transform and become more and more blue as time passes. Albedo is an intelligent and unassuming work, which gains success by gently inviting contemplation of our quickly changing world.
Tobias Fike, Make Broken, burned and dead tree limbs, wood, found objects, plaster, plastic bags, zip ties, rope, and metal hardware. On view at Chester Portsmouth Park, 12555 W. 27th Avenue, Lakewood, CO 80215. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Next to a picnic area and a short walk from the parking lot at Chester Portsmouth Park, 12555 W. 27th Avenue, Tobias Fike has assembled Make Broken. The primary structure is a conglomeration of dead tree limbs (burned in a nearby forest fire, as described by Fike in his audioclip. [4] From afar, it looks like just another young sapling planted neatly in a triangle of gravel. Up close, one can see the rope, zip ties, and bits of hardware that hold together the distinct components of the structure, accentuating the tree’s contrived nature. Sitting around the tree structure are four cast plaster blocks with pink plastic bags caught in the plaster.
As I approached, a toddler wandered past the low rope demarcating the area around the artwork and attempted to stomp on the pink plastic bags that ballooned and fluttered in the wind. This installation walks a fine line that many contemporary works walk—its use of lowly materials, actual trash like the pink plastic bags, lead an everyday viewer to question the viability of the piece as capital A “Art.” The toddler’s father wore a look of slight befuddlement as he shepherded his child away. It seemed he understood it to be a work of art, as it was roped off, but questioned why or how it had been able to gain that status.
A detail view of Tobias Fike’s Make Broken. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Yet, the installation achieves a type of beauty through its purposeful selection of materials and carefully overwrought construction. Fike creates a vignette of a stray plastic bag carried off by the wind and caught in a tree or fence. By purposefully reconstructing this commonplace occurrence with delicate pink plastic bags, Fike underscores its forlorn poignancy. In his audioclip, Fike explains how the title, Make Broken, invokes the concept of kintsugi—a Japanese practice of fixing broken pottery while highlighting the fissures with gold to celebrate the imperfect nature of the pottery. The beauty of Fike’s tree form is in its laborious connections, both carefully considered and crafted in the style of kintsugi. Through his purposeful acts of creation, the artist pulls meaning from discarded found objects and birthes art. [5]
Scottie Burgess, Sky Vessel, cast iron, upcycled dead tree, and paint. On view at Aviation Park at 1890 Teller Street, Lakewood, CO 80214. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
Sky Vessel, by Scottie Burgess, is hidden in plain sight in Aviation Park at 1890 Teller Street. As any good sculptor would, Burgess has not only considered the sculpture, he has also considered the pedestal it sits upon—in this case, a dead pine tree. The last few feet at the top of the tree have been shorn of branches and painted white, drawing the viewer’s eye up to the small sculpture atop. The cast iron lattice of the piece forms a hole-y vessel, which we view from below. Thus, this vessel functions not to hold something within it, instead it holds what is without it: “the limitless sky”. [6]
And Sky Vessel does well to balance simplicity with oddity. It is strange to find oneself standing in the middle of a grassy field in the middle of a suburb, staring up at a pair of dead pine trees, one of which has a small art object perched atop. That moment in which the viewer stops and considers, that moment that pulls you out of the humdrum of your daily comings and goings, is what all art hopes to achieve.
Jason Mehl, Spoor of the Anthropocene, CNC-cut plywood and paint. On view at Forsberg Iron Springs Park, 15900 W. Alameda Parkway, Lakewood, CO 80228. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
On a bare hillside in Forsberg Iron Springs Park, 15900 W. Alameda Parkway, sits Jason Mehl’s Spoor of the Anthropocene. Two of its bright yellow arms reach up in curving arabesques, and the other two rest on the dry grass. Two planes of CNC-cut plywood slot together to create this work. Its symmetry and cell-like holes refer to nature, while the glossy yellow color and hard, planar material clearly mark it as human-made.
An alternate view of Jason Mehl’s Spoor of the Anthropocene. Image by Jillian Blackwell.
The abstract sculpture is a gesture meant to tap into that same urge that makes one stop and pocket an interesting-looking rock on a hike. We lay claim to the natural world, and give it significance by attaching our sentiments to it. Mehl explores this familiarity with the natural world, and how our memory shapes and warps our perception of it. Each time we remember an occurrence, our minds return not to the occurrence, but to the last time we remember it, and so a memory changes as we remember it. In the same way, Mehl’s starting point is something real within the world, but this morphs through his hands, and reiterates itself in new ways with each work in the series. [7] Mehl highlights how our minds, through marking something as special, warp that very thing, sometimes past the point of recognition.
Though the curators of LandMark claim environment and climate change as the linchpin of the exhibit [8], the more remarkable characteristics that the artworks have in common are their poignancy, their introspection, and their humble invitation to the viewer to join in that introspection. In an outdoor exhibit where the pieces could literally be larger than life, the sculptures are modest in size and spread sparsely across multiple parks. The artworks are often tucked away a bit—under a bridge, on the other side of a creek, at the top of a dead tree. Their invitation for introspection is all the more welcoming because of the modest scale and presentation. None of these works are in your face, screaming for your attention. They sit and wait quietly for the next park denizen to stumble upon them.
Jillian Blackwell is a Denver-based artist and art educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics from the University of Pennsylvania.
[1] The full list of artists included in the Lakewood exhibition sites are Nicole Banowetz, Scottie Burgess, Tobias Fike, Anna Kaye, Tiffany Matheson, Jason Mehl, Jaime Molina, Kalliopi Monoyios, Mia Mulvey, and Eileen Roscina.
[2] From https://youraudiotour.com/tours/1352/stops/6396.
[3] Fromhttps://www.instagram.com/p/COULP6tlani/.
[4] From https://youraudiotour.com/tours/1352/stops/6449.
[5] Ibid.
[6] From https://youraudiotour.com/tours/1352/stops/6445.
[7] From https://youraudiotour.com/tours/1352/stops/6397.
[8] From https://www.landmarkexhibit.org/about.
