Seeks community interaction
She has tremendous vision, both as an artist, and as an organizer. She knew my poetry, and wanted to create a site-specific piece for the show that would encourage community interaction. Of course, that’s the whole mission of public art, but I didn’t realize at the time the depth and breadth of her skill in that. Adria is used to transforming spaces, inner and outer, in ways that draw people together — look at her website, and you’ll be amazed.
Windows, schools, parks …. She felt that poetry and art together could provide an even more powerful experience, and draw people’s attention to the resources we have here.
That’s how “Approach” was born. I had plenty of poetry, and willingness, but the concept of the placards was hers.
She created a pattern of colors, a whole revolving spectrum, with the phrases of the poem on the reverse sides. The placards provide a visual invitation, as well as a way of pacing the poem, so that it becomes a physical experience. We wanted something connected to the park, to the green space we have here.
Early walks at Menotomy
“The Field” — from my first collection, “Lucky” — provided that. Several poems in that book take place there, but this one sprang from those early walks at Menotomy that neighbors will identify with, morning after morning, watching the sheer joy of dogs romping. The dogs are completely in the moment; they don’t stop to regret the past, or yearn after future choices: They’re utterly grounded in their present.
It’s almost a metaphor for Art Rocks Menotomy — that potential for joy, for discovery, in the way we inhabit these spaces.
And the installation did spark that. It was amazing to see the placards catch someone’s attention. People would wander up, curious, just drinking in the colors, and then discover the words, and the poem.
“The Field” is a short piece, but we used something like 40 placards, with only a few words on each, four feet apart. So it created a walking pace, a rhythm like the poem. Some people would say each phrase aloud, or simply follow along, nodding. Others would call out to each other to come see; parents would read aloud to kids …. It was wonderful.
A different angle
Our new piece at the Fenway, “Why I Miss the Lost Trees,” has a different angle.
It uses the same display principles — placards with art on one side, and a poem on the other — but the effect is sharper, harder-hitting. Of course, we developed it for a show, “CrossRoads,” billed as “The Energy Necklace on the Emerald Necklace,” that focuses on climate change. This means all the installations highlight environmental risks in some way — a darker subject than the community theme of Art Rocks Menotomy. So we chose a poem of mine that’s essentially an elegy, an idiosyncratic litany of gifts someone might have learned from trees, even while those same trees succumb to human depredations.
Initially, I saw the poem as an expression of longing, but Adria felt the warning in it more strongly. So she created a color scheme based on yellow, for the text side of the placards, with a fascinating series of images on the back. As you follow it, you see the silhouette of a maple tree submerging and reemerging, in tones of blue on white. It’s almost ghostly, unlike the playful, vivid spectrum she used in Arlington.
But that was deliberate. In “Why I Miss the Lost Trees,” the format is shorter too: with only 15 placards, instead of forty, the viewer walks a tighter path. Each placard holds a whole line of poetry — not just a phrase, as in “The Field” — so the lines follow faster, one after the other. It makes the end feel more abrupt, as well.
Broader purpose, irony
You could say this piece, like the show itself, is really sounding the alarm for a broader purpose. Coincidentally, it’s also set on a quite gritty stretch of path behind the MFA, among a stand of dusty city trees that are pretty clearly suffering.
Of course, the irony of both our installations is that they’re made from the same kind of lawn signs that people use for political or even commercial campaigning. So we’ve subverted that, making the materials into a statement about participating in nature, in the case of “The Field,” at Art Rocks Menotomy, or about the destruction of what we’ve loved, in the case of “Why I Miss the Lost Trees,” in the “CrossRoads” show on the Fenway.
This explanation, which includes opinion, was published Thursday, Sept. 25, 2014.
