In a beaming 3,200 square-foot corner of the Miami Design District, artist Paula Crown has plans for TRANSPOSITION: Over Many Miles - an interactive sculpture engaging the surrounding community and mixed-use neighborhood. Her work channels Robert Smithson’s Earthworks and the ideas behind Rosalind Krauss’ essay on sculpture, Expanded Field, in a vision to integrate and manifest the relationship between art and the environment in which it is created.
Her work channels Robert Smithson’s Earthworks and the ideas behind Rosalind Krauss’ essay on sculpture, Expanded Field, in a vision to integrate and manifest the relationship between art and the environment in which it is created.
Inspired by a landscape sketch from her Africa Drawings (2010), TRANSPOSITION reflects the core of Crown’s artistic talents. From her careful selection of salvaged cedar and pine materials, to her 25’ x 6’ x 4’ perforation sculpture that will be featured on-site, she uses materials including reclaimed wood, tempered glass, metal and sand; and methods involving high-resolution scanning, scale alterations and 3D printing.
Perhaps truly fascinating about this project is its public and collaborative nature. Throughout the year, MDD has been producing a performance series that weaves guests into roving theater and musical acts at the Garden Rooftop and in the Moore Building spaces. Crown’s TRANSPOSITION feels like the tactile, national expansion of this immersive concept, as it quite literally mobilizes audiences in a parallel process that spans from the Midwest to Miami: Theaster Gates’ Studio, Studio Gang Architects and students and alumni from the Design Apprenticeship Program at Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago all participated in fabricating the piece.
Now on its way to Miami for art fair week, the installation is making a pit-stop before, in a final display of shared experience, it will be disassembled and relocated to a Chicago park. Free and open to the public, TRANSPOSITION will be on view December 1, 2014 through March 2015.
Crown was raised in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and is based in Chicago and Aspen. She has exhibited at Dallas Contemporary, The Aspen Institute, and presented a site-specific installation at EXPO Chicago 2014. Represented by Marlborough Gallery, Crown has a solo exhibition scheduled for February 2015.
