www.archpaper.com: Across the white, snow-covered slope of Eden, Utah’s, Powder Mountain, eight small fires flicker to life, a stack of boulders leans sideways, and a chairlift becomes a work of contemporary art. These works by Nancy Holt, Nobuo Sekine, and E.J. Hill were installed as part of the first phase of the Powder Art Foundation’s plan to turn the Utah ski resort into a year-round outdoor art museum.
4 comments:
I find myself feeling oddly conflicted over this article. My first thought is a love for site specific art, which it seems that Nancy Holt has captured especially well with her incorporation of the snow into her installation. I believe it is important to get art outside of galleries and into communities, but this feels instead like a commercialization of this concept. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings seems to just have taken the walls off of an art gallery to be able to advertise it in a new way, instead of community ideals. I also feel like putting art into spaces where people go to reconnect with nature misses the point of those spaces. It seems almost like a continuation of the need of younger generations to have multiple sources of information going into their brains at once. Plus, as the outdoors get smaller and smaller, I think it is more important than ever to leave habitats as they are. While this art is definitely less disrupting than construction and deforestation, the installation might have spooked creatures that call these areas their home.
Now this is the type of immersive art I am really intrigued by. I absolutely love the idea of bring more people out to nature. I believe it is so healing to experience the blend of art and the outdoors. I also love the idea of turning the spaces used for skiing in the winter into year round places for people to visit. I can’t tell you how many times I have driven past empty ski resorts in the summer and it just look quite sad. I am curious to hear more about the logistics of this project. It seemed as though a lot of the installations were meant for the warmer months, (or at least the months that dont involve feet of snow). Will they take down the art installations during the winter? I hope that they find a way to leave all of the installations up throughout the winter because I think seeing art while actively skiing might just be the coolest thing ever.
This is a really cool concept and I’m sure it can make significant progress. I think being able to enjoy art while doing an activity like skiing is very unique. You would never think to see art pieces while skiing down the mountain or sitting on a chairlift. Pieces like the chandeliers hung up to visible during the day and night when lit. It allows the art to be enjoyed no matter the time or day, preventing a limit to when these pieces can be seen. It’s also great to see works like the Starfire, making visually pleasing works during the night time, which I believe makes the environment even better. I would love to see these kind of works spread to different ski resorts across the country, as I would love to one day be able to go out skiing one day and be able to enjoy the artwork the ski resort chooses to showcase.
This is a really interesting concept and it gets me wondering about some of the logistical issues, maintenance and accessibility. I do wonder how the individual pieces will change throughout the seasons. I also wonder how art exhibit management relates to the world of scenery. We have to solve the same problems with slightly different variables and it would be interesting to see how they solve those problems. I also ask myself with art exhibits like this how accessible it is to everyone and how do they solve the accessibility issue? Not everyone can ski but I can see this being utilized as a way to explore the mountains without the added hazards of skiing. I wonder if this is an option that they are going to offer. As coming from a family that would go on ski vacations frequently the grandparents would stay back while the rest of us would go and explore the mountains. I wonder if this could be offered in a way that almost everyone could participate.
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