DAVID WOOD, “Spiral Resonance Field”, Anderson-Abruzzo International Balloon Museum, Albuquerque, NM / Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM /Mountainair NM [virtual installation], July-Nov 2009. PVC water pipe, steel, wood, stainless steel, laserdiscs [plastic, aluminum], stone, solar lights, polyurethane foam, thin air/imagination. [I. 200’ x 225’ x 1’-12’] [II/III. 10’ x 10’ x 1-12’] x 139 miles.            

                                                                                                                                                              

I am a British artist, working out of Nashville, and teaching philosophy and environmental art at Vanderbilt University. Developing Yellow Bird Sculpture Park in Woodbury, TN is one of my passions.  My main areas of interest lie in time, imagination, and the natural world.

See www.artsnashville.org/registry/?scan=az&main=artist&id=193 & http://www.landartnm.org/balloon-museum.html

LAND ART. Spiral Resonance Field echoes Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in a spiraling reprise, critically repeating cosmic and entropic motifs.

SPIRALS. Smithson’s most charismatic Land Art was more tame: a single arithmetical spiral. Spiral Resonance Field is a double geometrical spiral, accelerating away from the center, or meeting and plunging together into a vortex , depending on where you start. If space and time had a common origin, it would be a spiral. Spirals capture the repetition with a difference through which any identity is sustained. The spiral saves the circle from the deadly boredom of its perfection. In the spiral opposites are drawn into productive tension: geometry and organic form, the terrestrial and the cosmic.

LASERDISCS. The poles rise out of mirror-reflective lilypads, shimmering laserdiscs, introducing new temporalities: event-flashes of color, fading obsolescent technology.

SUN AND WIND. Spiral Resonance Field situates itself dynamically in circuits of energy, absorbing sunlight during the day, releasing it again at night, resonating with the wind and ambient sound waves. Its ranks of poles rise and fall in undulating rhythms, setting the vertical to music.

ECO-ART. Spiral Resonance Field reminds us that we need to leave the past behind.and embrace a more sustainable future. The future is solar. It has two aeolian harps telling us that we need to ‘listen’ to the elemental, out there and in us. 

PARTICIPATION: I had some extraordinary help in making this piece. And not only from humans. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was out trimming poles when the wind came up, and began ripping the lights and top laserdisc collars from the poles, and knocking over the poles themselves. The laserdiscs had been placed just under the lights at the top. The whole project was doomed, everything we had done wasted ... I had to take down 100 poles or so in minutes, and lay them out of the wind. After total panic, I decided the discs could work as earth-level lilypads. I had tried this out at YB, and it was now the only solution. Later people confided in me that they preferred the new arrangement. Lucky the wind spoke before we left town.

THE SITE. The Balloon Museum (www.cabq.gov/balloon/) is devoted to the celebration of the hot air balloon, the way it connects earth and sky, freedom and imagination, power and fragility, control and contingency. Spiral Resonance Field pulses in the space opened up by these concerns. It also occupies a disputed space, creeping out of a crater created for a reflecting pond concept abandoned in the light of local water shortages. Site development has been stalled ever since, and even this temporary piece ignites old arguments.

WHAT IS A WORK OF ART? Earth art is notoriously dependent on photography, whether because it is short-lived or located far from civilization. Any three dimensional art changes with the angle from which it is seen. Spiral Resonance Field celebrates this perspectivism; every detail, every sweep of poles, every reflection in the laser discs, every new backdrop – adds another ingredient to the whole, which changes when you walk through it, glimpse it from afar, from the museum balconies, or from a balloon. And this piece in particular has quite different faces at night and during the day.

WHEN IS A WORK OF ART? Art is typically the product of incomplete gestation, born before it is completely formed, continuing to be shaped as it is being born, and developed in expanding circles of meaning as its creator(s) and critics reflect on it. The job of the artist is to set in motion questions, events, possibilities that the ongoing experiencing of the work allows to be developed. This piece is officially described as ‘temporary’ (July-Nov 2009). When will it have most existed? At its first completion? In the memory? Or the photographs and accompanying words?

Photo: "Spiral Resonance Field: II", Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe

 

from Marilee Schmit Nason

Curator of Collections

Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum

 

"The great joy of being a curator lies in interacting directly with artifacts and artistic creations – becoming acquainted their physical structure as well as the historical and cultural contexts in which they were used. With the installation of Spiral Resonance Field at the Albuquerque Balloon Museum, a team of volunteers from the University of New Mexico, museum employees and this curator enjoyed the added benefit of working directly with the artist, David Wood.

 

The creation of Wood’s Albuquerque piece required artistic inspiration, meticulous planning, cross-country hauling, and even hard labor. In the development of the piece, the artist was reminded that making art is always a process. In this case, the environment itself demanded that the artist respond to it with flexibility as winds strained the original design, and the intense New Mexico sun put the solar-powered lights to the test.

 

The result is a striking land art sculpture on the Balloon Museum grounds. By day mirror-like laser discs reflect the intense New Mexico sky and launch prismatic sparks that flash their light on nearby landscape and architecture. By night solar lamps delineate the undulating visual rhythm of 300 poles emerging from and descending back into Albuquerque’s hardpan soil in a double spiral. At all times, the song of the wind resonates on the strings of a pair of Aeolian harps.

 

Earthbound visitors can experience Spiral Resonance Field from within; view it from the rim of the crater in which it is installed, or study it from the Museum’s balconies. The placement of the piece at the Museum, located on Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, invites aerial views as well, and provides a wonderful photographic opportunity for balloon pilots launching from the Park.

 

The installation of Spiral Resonance Field is in keeping with Balloon Museum’s ongoing commitment to exhibitions featuring history, science, art and culture. We feel fortunate to have it on display for all to see through the month of October 2009."