| In the summer of 1975 Chihuly was among the nearly
forty artists (including Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Grosvenor, and
Alan Saret) invited to create temporary, site-specific work at Artpark,
a public park and land reclamation site in Lewiston, New York, near
Niagra Falls. It was the second summer of this continuing program
in which artists are asked to work out-of-doors and permit the public
to watch and interact with them. Chihuly was invited to collaborate
with his old friend Seaver Leslie, a RISD graduate in painting.
For about ten days in late August and early September they created
a series of temporary installations using thin sheets of German-made
colored glass. They had help from the artists Kate Elliott, later
Chihuly's assistant and now a dealer of contemporary glass, Paul
Inveen, Benjamin Moore, and Phil Hastings.
The most transient of his projects, more like minimalist stage sets than sculptures, the Artpark pieces are Chihuly's most spontaneous and ethereal works. He and his friends moved the fragile sheets around the park site, photographing single and clustered sheets of glass both indoors and in the landscape. The team pieced together multi-paneled windows, fitted single sheets into the crevices of the site's sheer stone walls, lined up sheets in the culvert of a waterfall that fell into the Niagra River, and stuck them into the mud in the shallows at the river's edge. Reflection, refraction, and shadow were the substance of these pieces lit by sunlight, with mirrors, battery-powered flashlights, candles, and fire.
As always, Chihuly and his collaborators made extensive photo documentation of the illuminated color and shape of the rectangular sheets of glass playing off the architecture of their quonset hut studio and outdoors against the land, water, and sky. As Chihuly later remarked, only in reviewing the photos of his Artpark residency did he realize how much he had learned in those ten days, both about the uses of color and the extensive possibilities inherent in site-specific projects.
Dale
Chihuly: Installations 1964–1992 by Patterson Sims
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