This evening I viewed a really interesting TV commercial for the Royal Botanical Gardens. Featured in this ad is a special outdoor exhibition called Earth Art, which runs from July to October 2009. I am definitely intrigued and plan to visit this place before it closes.
What is Earth Art?
In the excerpt below from the Royal Botanical Gardens web site, a history of this art form is presented.
Earth Art’s roots stretch back to the 1960s with a show at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Curator Willoughby Sharp invited artists Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, David Medalla, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, and Gunther Uecker. Together these artists created a new style of installation work – Earth Art.
By 1964, Fredrick Kiesler was exhibiting his visionary Environmental Sculpture at the Guggenheim. In 1970, Robert Smithson crafted a 1500 foot long, 15 foot wide Spiral Jetty made of black basalt rocks and earth. Soon after, Alan Sonfist created what is one of the world’s most significant urban permacultural artworks, Time Landscape (1965-present) bringing ecological awareness to the urban context of New York City.
Earth Art has evolved as an international phenomenon, and over the decades, has become less about concept and more about the aesthetics of integration. It also involves notions of sustainability and site awareness. With its Earth Art initiatives – three shows to date – Royal Botanical Gardens brings great knowledge and expertise in working with nature to integrate the sculptures produced during their Earth Art exhibitions. Collaging and contrasting and building with nature’s materials on-site, the Earth Art shows have brought some of the original progenitors and visionaries such as Dennis Oppenheim, Nils-Udo and Alan Sonfist to produce works here in Canada. Equally we have shifted to focus globally to include artists from Japan (Ichi Ikeda), Korea (Ko), Chile (Pilar Ovalle), and this will continue. With this initiative, RBG is establishing itself as a foremost world venue for the production, creation, invention, exploration and interface of art with nature. May the show go on!
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