A River is a Drawing
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
October 12, 2018–January 20, 2019
Photography: Kris Graves, courtesy Pace Gallery
I see rivers as fluid moving drawings— delineated and drawn out. I have never explored the same river in varied mediums at one time the way I plan to at the Hudson River Museum. From the bamboo garden stakes, which will create a drawing you physically interact with, to an interior flood of marbles of the very same river, to a smaller mapping of the entire Hudson River watershed. Each one is a unique drawing, and each one offers a different way in which the body will interact with the form.
The exhibition presents twelve works, with continuous focus on bodies of water, particularly the Hudson River. It begins in the lobby space with Pin River—Hudson Watershed, 2018, one of the largest in the series of her pin-river sculptures to date, composed of more than 20,000 pins. In the Museum’s Courtyard, Reed River, 2018, an immersive installation is created from more than 200 bamboo reeds in the form of a 3D drawing of the Hudson River basin. Another outdoor installation, Concrete River, 2018, is on HRM’s veranda and overhang looking out to the river vista. The piece connects existing cracks, holes, bumps on the grounds, by filling them in with painted silver lines, visually connecting the Museum’s campus to the river.
Continuing to the indoor space and responding to the HRM’s Brutalist building features, The Hudson Bight, 2018, an augmented seafloor map of the Hudson Canyon—a submarine canyon created by the glacial change at the end of the last Ice Age—cascades through the Atrium, a 30-foot installation with contours drawn with webbing wires. In the adjacent gallery, a flood of approximately 22,000 pale blue-green industrial glass marbles takes on a shape of the grand Hudson River basin in Folding the Hudson, 2018. The marbles follow and defy natural gravity and spread throughout the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. The exhibition includes new drawings on paper that magnify points of interest in various waterways around New York as well as encaustic relief sculptures based on the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which condense shapes of glacial changes of past millennial cycles affecting shapes of water as well as land.
The exhibition also includes an open-ended and invitational question What is Missing?, Maya Lin’s ongoing interactive digital art project and environmental advocacy movement. A darkened gallery is dedicated to the multi-channel video projection.
What Is Missing?—Hudson River Timeline, is a moving timeline composed of text and images narrating habitat changes and population fluctuations of various species in and around the Hudson River throughout history up to the present. As we experience effects of climate change with increasing frequency and intensity, it is urgent to become aware of what happened in the environment before and what is happening to it now. The exhibition gives form to the macrocosmic workings of nature, as embodied in the Hudson River, and brings its presence in an affective, human scale.
Related Press:
Ellin, Abby. Maya Lin Captures the Hudson’s Beauty and Power. The New York Times (October 25, 2018)
Artnet News. I See Rivers as Fluid Moving Drawings. Artnet News (October 25, 2018)