[Maya Lin] Systematic Landscapes

Maya Lin

Systematic Landscapes

Henry Art Gallery

Seattle, Washington

 

“Maya Lin has an extraordinary ability to convey complex and poetic ideas using simple forms and natural materials.”

Richard Andrews

Director Henry Art Gallery

 

The exhibition is on view through September 3, 2006.

 

Maya Lin works with a vocabulary of form culled from her study of landscape. By altering scale and materials, she creates works that connect the ideal and the real.

 

The three installations all engage with the problem of bringing land masses into architecture by translating landscapes, two real and one imagined, into the materials of architecture while inviting viewers to move under, on, or through the works.

Each work is composed of a single material. Each, configured to evoke a different aspect of landscape, went through the same process of design: creation of a three-dimensional model in Lin’s studio, translation via scanning or plotting into digital drawings, and finally, full scale construction in Seattle.

 

2x4 Landscape is composed of more than fifty thousand vertical two-by-four boards placed in a configuration minutely detailed in models and drawings. Covering approximately twenty-four hundred square feet, it rises from a plane of short two-by-four segments to a hill ten feet tall. From some views the sculpture reads as a land from, and from others as a rising wave.