Andrea Rosen Gallery is pleased to recognize Josiah McElheny's Prismatic Park, a major exhibition commissioned and organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York on view from June 13 - October 8, 2017.
The outdoor exhibition will comprise three exquisite sculptures in painted wood and prismatic glass: minimal, almost architectural forms that will create new spaces within the Park for the creation of music, dance, and poetry: a curvilinear, translucent blue sound wall for experimental music; a circular, reflective green floor for vanguard dance; and a vaulted-roofed luminous red and yellow pavilion for poetry. Throughout the exhibition, three nonprofit art organizations based in New York - Blank Forms, Danspace Project, and Poets House - will "inhabit" the Park to realize new commissions. McElheny has also offered the participating artists a prompt to consider the Park not only for performances, but also for rehearsals or even impromptu workshops. When not occupied by the resident artists, the public will have access to the sculptures to view or to adopt as a framework for their own innovative use.
In recent years, various parks have been especially important as sites for political assertion, such as Gezi Park in Istanbul, Tahrir Square in Cairo, and Zuccotti Park in New York. McElheny takes impetus from the activism of recent years, but Prismatic Park reconceives this ferment as an idealistic, almost utopian concept for the shared responsibility towards a public site that still allots space for the highly individual, unique voice.
