Skid Rows
Ummmmm.... yeah.... "As part of the Queens Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition Down the Garden Path: The Artist’s Garden After Modernism, join us for a kick-off hoe-down on Thursday, May 19, from 6:15 to 7:30 pm, as artist Brian Tolle and Diana Balmori Landscape will careen around a two-acre grassy expanse of the Queens Botanical Garden doing doughnuts in a red 1991 Chevy pickup truck covered with flower decals. Not once. Not twice. But again and again and again. “What?” and “why?” you ask." Answer after the fold. As part of the launch of Skid Rows, country music, bbq and “down home” refreshments will be served.
Date: Thursday, May 19th
Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Venue: Queens Botanical Gardens (43-50 Main Street, Queens)
Cost: Free
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Employing a revolutionary new method of farming called direct sowing, Tolle and Balmori will plant an unusual flower garden—and work of public art—in New York City. Entitled Skid Rows, the hybrid performance and earthwork has been commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art as part of a large-scale survey of contemporary artist gardens, Down the Garden Path: The Artist’s Garden After Modernism, on view in the museum’s galleries and in Flushing Meadows Corona Park from June 26 through October 9, 2005.
In the Skid Rows performance, Tolle and Balmori will “draw” a flower garden, with the 1991 Chevy Silverado sowing seeds that will blossom into a dizzying trail of red poppies and yellow tickweed in time for the Down the Garden Path opening on June 26.
The final form of the garden derives from the loops and tire tracks laid down randomly by the drivers of the truck, with the seeds being planted in the actual tracks that the truck leaves behind. The overall pattern of Skid Rows will be visible from the air to airplane passengers flying into and out of LaGuardia Airport, while park-goers will be able to savor its colorful blooms and subtle, varied layering from vantage points within the Queens Botanical Garden.
“By ‘drawing’ this complex linear garden, Diana and I are updating a traditional kind of garden called a parterre de broderie, whose intricate geometrical patterns were borrowed from embroidery, hence the name,” says Tolle, an artist best-known for the celebrated Irish Hunger Memorial in New York’s Battery Park City (2002). “So you could say we’re doing a French garden, only American-style, with a pickup truck,” he continues.
“With Skid Rows, Brian and I are trying to find a different interpretation of what a garden can be and how its pieces work together,” explains Balmori, a leading advocate of urban sustainability in New York City. “And, sure, we are making the work entertaining—and in the service of an environmentally healthy new method of horticulture but mainly as a mode of artistic expression. The fact that we are using the new method of direct sowing instead of plowing because it preserves the structure of the soil is like the use of a new material or process, one, which allows you to give new form. In this case very thin “drawing” lines (i.e. planting). ”
Says Valerie Smith, Director of Exhibitions, Queens Museum of Art, “Skid Rows is a meditation on the garden, the act of drawing and the use of public space, created by two original thinkers who are major influences in their fields.”
Tolle and Balmori’s previous collaborations have included a proposal for a green solution to pedestrian and vehicular traffic for the Queens Plaza subway station and a waterfront reclamation project for a polluted area of Chicago’s public beaches. In both cases, the goal was to realize a public space that would be both aesthetically pleasing and sustainable.
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Posted by Chris at 06:00 PM
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