Penland School will have two events this weekend marking the opening of a group of four art installations on the Penland campus. The installations are the work of Dan Bailey, Alison Collins, Kyoung Ae Cho, and Anne Lemanski, and they are part of a project called 0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art, which is a collaboration between Penland School and the North Carolina Museum of Art. The opening events will include a evening slide lecture on April 19 and an afternoon walking tour on April 20. The installations will be on view until August 31.
On Friday, April 19, the four artists will each make a short slide presentation about their work. They will be joined by Linda Dougherty, the museum’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art, who will give an overview of the project. This event will take place in the Northlight building at Penland at 8:00 PM. On Saturday, April 20 there will be a walking tour of the four installations beginning at 1:30 PM. Penland’s director, Jean McLaughlin, will make some introductory remarks at the Pines Portico and then each of the four artists will speak when the group visits their installation.
Filmmaker, animator, and photographer Dan Bailey has created a two-part work using time-lapse and low-altitude aerial balloon photography. Looking Up is a slow-moving time-lapse video of the sky over Penland. The vantage point is reversed in Looking Down, a large printed wall piece that is a collage of photographs of the campus made over many months using a camera attached to a helium balloon.
Alison Collins’s Temps Perdu will fill the Dye Shed, a historic log structure at Penland, with hundreds of yards of muslin and hundreds of muslin leaves. On the yardage is text from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. On the leaves are words that refer the things the artist herself has lost. The text is written using a dye Alison made from the rust that collected under some of her steel sculptures.
Anne Lemanski’s Extirpated is about animal species that once inhabited this region but have disappeared with no hope of return. The format of Lemanski’s piece is a series of clotheslines suspended between steel supports based on the contour of Kentucky long rifles. Hanging from the lines will be silhouette images of species that have disappeared from Mitchell County.
Kyoung Ae Cho’s Shining Ground, memorializes her discovery of mica the first time she visited Penland in 2000. The piece incorporates mica collected from the banks of the Toe River into vertical panels made of cloth, pins, and wood, which will be installed on the outside of the Northlight building. The piece is her attempt to recapture, many years later, the moment of quiet surprise when she first saw the ground covered with the sheen of mica sand.
The other component of the 0 to 60 project is a major exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The exhibition, which is open now and runs through August 11, includes work by the four installation artists along with twenty-eight other artists, many of whom have connections to Penland. This exhibition engages the viewer in an experiential and conceptual journey through time, looking at how time can be used as form, content, and material, and how art is used to represent, evoke, manipulate, or transform time. The exhibition will continue through August 11.
Here’s an ongoing album of pictures from the project.