Terra Firma: Land and Landscape in Art of the 1980s

Art that is of, about, and from the land is featured in Terra Firma: Land & Landscape in Art of the 1980's. The exhibition comprises seventeen works by contemporary artists who use aspects of the land in creating their work, Five New York artists—Petah Coyne, Danita Geltner, Eve Laramee, Robert Lobe and Michelle Stuart—are included in the exhibition. Also included is the Boyle Family from Great Britain (Mark Boyle, Joan Hills, and their children, Georgia and Sebastian) in their first New York showing in 10 years.

Reflected in the works are the artists' interest in principles stemming from the earthwork movement of the 1960's—the use of natural materials, the representation of landscape in sculpture rather than painting, and an awareness of contemporary threats to the environment.

While earthwork artists challenged traditional concepts by creating monumental outdoor sites, Ms. Ferrer says that "the artists in this exhibition isolate natural materials and forms within gallery spaces, provoking the viewer to contemplate the land, not in its boundless grandeur, but with finite resources in mind."

The artists represented in the exhibition work in widely varying ways.

The Boyle Family recreate randomly selected fragments of the earth's surface with fiberglass and other materials. Three of their wall-mounted sculptures offering an unusual vantage point for viewing the land will be on view.

Robert Lobe hammers strips of aluminum over trees and rocks, then welds them together to produce hollow, three-dimensional forms. Eve Laramee's "From Source to Mouth," a construction to be built in the gallery for the exhibition, will use copper, rock salt, water, glass and wood to produce an everchanging installation caused by evaporation, crystallization and sedimentation.

Branches, roots and other leftovers of the bulldozer's drive to clear land for development form the basis of the monumental organic forms by Petah Coyne constructed to hang from the ceiling. Michelle Stuart creates "books" by rubbing pages made of natural material, cloth and paper with pigments culled from river banks, and quarries, and Danita Geltner employs driftwood and other items washed ashore alongside imitations of the natural (like Astroturf) to create ironic works contrasting romantic concepts of landscape with the reality of urban decay.