Latest news with #RichardSerra
CBC
a day ago
- Lifestyle
- CBC
What can this hidden masterpiece of Canadian land art tell us about place?
There is a small scratch of farmland nestled in a subdivision of King, Ont., that is remarkably ordinary. Its pebble-pocked soil has produced commonplace crops: potatoes, soybeans, wheat. The ragged hedgerow fringing its irregular border leads to marshy swampland. Beyond that sit rows of mass-produced mansions with faux-stone facades. And yet, this site has inspired the creation of not one but two notable Canadian artworks whose meanings are inextricably bound to its specific coordinates and conditions. The field is a shallow, undulating bowl. Its slight dip makes it awkward to plow. But what really gets in the way are the six large concrete slabs zigzagging through its centre, each 20 centimetres wide and 1.5 metres high. Installed between 1970 and 1972 by the late U.S. sculptor Richard Serra, who is widely regarded as one of the most important artists in modern times, the slabs standing in the field constitute the artwork Shift. In a potato field north of Toronto, a massive hidden artwork teaches us about site-specific art 4 years ago Duration 8:22 The work is no secret, but it has been largely overlooked in the annals of art history. No plaque or signage near the site indicates it is anything other than abandoned construction materials. Shift was commissioned by collector Roger Davidson, who invited Serra to perform a sculptural intervention on a small plot of land he owned. Serra and his partner at the time, U.S. artist Joan Jonas, walked toward each other from either side of the field, and the paths they took inscribed Shift 's form. In the years that followed, Serra (and Jonas, too) rose to worldwide acclaim. Serra became known as a "giant" or "titan" of Minimalism, in celebration of his colossal Cor-Ten steel counter-monuments, which challenged the constraints of the white cube. In 2004, for example, Toronto's Pearson International Airport built the roof and walls of its Terminal 1 around the metal fins of Serra's Tilted Spheres. Davidson sold the field to a developer a few years after the sculpture was completed, and both continued to exist in a state of benign neglect for decades. A few devoted art pilgrims trekked past "no trespassing" signs to glimpse the early Serra earthwork in person, but the setting was mostly an overgrown backdrop for local dog walkers. For 50 years, not much changed. Artist Derek Sullivan first visited the artwork on a muggy day in July 2021. "I remember having to pull the mosquitoes out of my eyes. It was horrible," he says of his initial trip, trudging through a murky swamp, to access the Shift site. Sullivan's original plan was to visit the U.S. to see land art masterworks such as Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field (1977), but that idea was scuppered by COVID-19 travel restrictions. "I liked the theatre of getting there," he says of his desire to visit the remote and mythic destinations, "and thought as a research project it could be interesting." Then Sullivan remembered there was supposedly a seminal work of land art located practically in his backyard. "It has all of the things that are problematic about these other works," he realized. "Someone from away, coming and making this large gesture for seeming perpetuity on the landscape." Raised in Richmond Hill, one town over from King, Sullivan was born in 1976, just a few years after the first bag of concrete was poured to make Shift 's foundation. During the pandemic, like so many others around the world, he spent a lot of time taking walks. Over the next year, he began making expeditions to the field every few weeks. In summer, it was a "herbaceous meadow, with all of the dogwoods in full leaf," says Sullivan. Herons perched on Shift 's concrete walls before soaring up to their treetop nests. In fall, wind whipped through the landscape, and local BMX-riding teenagers made bonfires against the sculpture's sides. In winter, occasional footprints crunched into the fresh snow revealed how infrequently the land was traversed. Befitting the mood of a brutalist artwork in the suburbs, his experiences were rather antisocial. On one of the few attempts Sullivan made to greet a passing dog walker, she quickly shot at him, "I can't even talk." Sullivan isn't the first artist to have corresponded with Serra's work as part of his practice. In 1981, David Hammons used Serra's sculpture T.W.U. (Transport Workers Union) as a urinal in the performance Pissed Off and flung footwear at it in Shoe Tree. In 2003, for The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney featured Serra slinging Vaseline (instead of lead, as the sculptor did in Splash Piece: Casting from 1969). Serra isn't the first senior artist that Sullivan has been in conversation with, either. Sullivan's Endless Kiosk reimagined Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938) as expanding in girth instead of height, and his artist book, Persistent Huts, pays homage to artists Martin Kippenberger and Ed Ruscha, who famously quipped, "All art comes from other art." "I'm going to be honest, I'm actually not a huge Richard Serra fan," Sullivan admits. For his purposes, Shift became merely "a thing to think with." In the series of large-scale drawings that Sullivan created as a response to his visits to Shift, the sculpture rarely appears. Instead, Sullivan focused on the "negative space" around it. "I end up looking at the ground more than the sculpture," he says. Laid out in Sullivan's characteristic style emulating press signatures, the drawings become a scrapbook of the ephemera the artist accumulated during his trips: rocks he picked up, signage he noticed, ticket stubs he found in his jacket pocket, shadows cast in iPhone snapshots. "Most of the things included are chance discoveries," he says. "The hubris of modernist sculpture in this period, the way that artists were attempting to modify the landscape, that is a very male [ego-driven] idea," says McMichael Canadian Art Collection curator John Geoghegan, who organized Field Notes, an exhibition of the works Sullivan created from his Shift studies. "I like that Derek takes the piss out of that." Sullivan has been a professional in the art world for more than two decades, and is careful to maintain a healthy distance from its more pompous trappings. "I keep thinking of the way that our art knowledge is so enriching," he says. "The way that these things are made can tell us about other people's experiences of the world. But at the same time, I also wonder how much of that might get in the way. Like, when I'm having a great walk from now on, will I think, 'Oh, this is like that Serra'? It actually diminishes it. It imposes a filter on the experience." As Sullivan's drawings are layered with flora, fauna and other tangential signifiers of his viewing experience, he makes note of the strata of meanings stacked around Shift. "I love the way that most of those plants that grew along the sculpture were either deposited by the wind or by the poop of birds," Sullivan says. He sees the movement of glaciers in the rocky soil, evidence of colonial and 100-acre farm agricultural systems in the imposed boundaries of the land, and another impending recalibration of the area as wealthy cul-de-sacs encroach on the site's outskirts. "What does it mean to stage global conversations from Toronto? What does it mean to show artists from here thinking about the world and how those conversations happen?" asks Adam Welch, associate curator of modern art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has acquired Sullivan's six-panel drawing, Out Standing in a Field, 2021–22, from this body of work. "This work is so aligned with that idea," says Welch. "We're thinking about an artist who is very much from here, has a very robust and interesting international practice and is exhibited widely, but attends to this history in the GTA that a lot of people wouldn't know." Now that Sullivan's project has been exhibited at a local art museum, recorded in book format, acquired by a national institution and written about by journalists, is his shift at Shift complete? "I don't feel the need to come as often as I did before," he says. The experience has inspired a new way of drawing for him that involves close looking and a gradual accrual of overlapping elements. "I've been focusing on the specifics of locations," Sullivan says. "Subsequent to this, I have been working on drawings of the view of the back alley behind my place in Toronto." He has also started building (and drawing) a wall of his own from stones excavated during a renovation of his studio, which sits in a patch of farmland he owns in eastern Ontario. At 21 metres long, it is "almost at the scale of one of the segments here," Sullivan says, referring to Shift. As for the sculpture and the field, now basking in the afterglow of renewed attention, what comes next? Perhaps the site will have its cause taken up by a passionate conservationist who will erect a plaque, encase the crumbling concrete in a Plexiglas tomb and manicure the land into a lawn for picnickers. Perhaps it will slip silently into another long hibernation and be swallowed up by wildflowers and weeds. Perhaps it will attract a fresh wave of art pilgrims and inspire another artwork that will enhance our understanding of the passing of time and our place in the world. To find out, we will have to keep walking and looking.
Globe and Mail
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Hidden in plain sight
Ontario artist Derek Sullivan has no special affection for the minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s, with its unadorned surfaces and abstract geometries. And he detects some hubris in the American land art movement of the period, which inserted modernism right into the earth, producing such renowned installations as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Donald Judd's desert sculptures at Marfa, Texas, and Richard Serra's monumental site-specific works. 'I'm not actually a huge fan of Serra; the grandness is not how I like to work: I prefer scrappy pencil drawings,' Sullivan said. And yet here he is, on a spring morning, standing in a fallow field about 50 kilometres north of Toronto, contemplating what is probably the most celebrated but least seen example of Serra's land art. Shift, a series of six low concrete walls following the line of the rolling moraine, was erected in 1972 on private farmland owned by the Toronto developer and art collector Roger Davidson. He had invited Serra to build on his country property in King City, Ont., and the American artist came to Canada accompanied by his then-partner and collaborator, artist Joan Jonas, to build Shift. Serra, who died in 2024, was one of America's most important modernist sculptors and Shift is considered a seminal work from his early career: Sullivan was introduced to photographs of the piece as an art student at York University. Yet it is also little known and seldom seen because no one is really responsible for it. While other land art pieces are carefully preserved by art foundations or museums, Shift has been left to the elements, partly overgrown with grasses and dogwood, and occasionally dinged by a farmer's passing tractor. 'What I like about the Serra is its roughness, the fact that it's cracked, that it's scraped, that it's been allowed to age with the space. It's not maintained as a precious thing that has to be intact,' Sullivan said. 'I call this one a feral artwork. No one cares for it.' It's the relationship between the art and its changing site that really interests Sullivan, who has created a body of work about the sculpture and its unlikely setting now showing at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in nearby Kleinburg. His project extends his interest in the context in which art is made and seen: A previous piece reimagined a tall column sculpture by the Romanian modernist Constantin Brancusi, which suggested infinite height as a Toronto telephone pole covered in flyers with the potential for infinite girth. He is always interested in how art is distributed and has printed many of his own artist's books. Davidson, who died in 2005, sold his property a few years after Shift was erected and it now stands on land that belongs to Great Gulf, the builder of several local subdivisions. It's all private property, but local dog walkers and dirt bikers use the forest that leads to the field, and someone recently built a bonfire up against Shift. Meanwhile, a local farmer rotates crops, including wheat and soybean, in the field. Great Gulf has no plans to build on the site because it is a protected cultural landscape under the Ontario Heritage Act, said Kathleen Schofield, the developer's president of low-rise residential. And the surrounding land is part of the protected Oak Ridges Moraine. 'The site will remain as is for the foreseeable future,' she said in a statement provided to The Globe. When Sullivan first decided to investigate in 2021, he wasn't sure he would be able to reach Shift, thinking he would find it surrounded by subdivisions. He grew up in suburban Richmond Hill, Ont., and figured his work based on Shift would be about encroaching suburbia or blocked access to the site. Using wayfinding skills he perfected playing video games as a boy, he found the right path and emerged from the forest on a hot July day. Foliage eclipsed any sign of nearby housing while a flock of herons sat in a row on one of Shift's handy walls. It was nature not development that was in charge. His pencil and mixed media drawings, entitled Field Notes, reflect that, with images of the herons and of his own shadow looming over the ground as he photographs the site or bends down to pick up stones. Illustrative and narrative, they are far removed from grand minimalist sculpture. 'I find it eye-watering the resources that go into that kind of work, for the vision of a singular person. I often respond more strongly to the poetics of a scrappy piece of material. Or that an idea in an artist's book can be equally profound and grand and huge. The sense of mass and scale is only achieved by actually making it that mass,' he said, referring to Shift. 'So, I recognize that it does need to be this way, but it's the antithesis of how I would want to work.' Sullivan's work is moving on now; he teaches at Toronto's Ontario College of Art & Design University and works out of a weekend studio east of the city, near Tamworth, Ont., where he is cutting out the modernist middleman and erecting his own dry-stone wall. Meanwhile, the future of Shift remains foggy. Municipal preservation efforts in the early 2000s did lead to designating the field a protected cultural landscape but in 2010-12 the Art Gallery of Ontario abandoned discussions about acquiring Shift when it became clear there wouldn't be public access. Sullivan, who is cautious about revealing the field's exact location, thinks that if it were turned into a public park Serra's walls would soon be targeted with graffiti. Today Shift is famous yet hidden, safe in its state of neglect. Derek Sullivan: Field Notes continues at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., until June 29.
South China Morning Post
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Can Hong Kong museum-goers put away the phones and see the art?
Richard Serra once said in an interview with Charlie Rose, 'Art is purposely useless'. What the artist known for his colossal sculptures meant was that, unlike architecture, art can escape from all constraints and restrictions and be free. Advertisement Well, Serra would eat his words if he had a chance to see what museum visitors are like these days. At the recent 'Picasso for Asia – A Conversation ' exhibition at M+ , most people were either busy taking photos of the art or taking selfies with the art behind them. I wondered how many people would put away their mobile phones to enjoy the show, or have the heart to learn a little more background on the works. More often than not, I found myself getting in the way of the selfie-takers when reading the labels for the artworks. All of a sudden, art has a lot of purpose. It now serves as the ideal backdrop for social media vanity as the selfie-takers scream: 'I was there!' 'I saw a real Picasso!' But I am guilty as charged; I had a family photo taken in front of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper several weeks ago. Having read about the painting for years, including in Dan Brown's Da Vinci's Code , I was mesmerised when I saw the masterpiece in person. I could not resist sharing the joy with others back home as I stepped out of the dining room of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Advertisement Throughout the years, I have been to museums and galleries in London, Amsterdam and Milan. Occasionally, there were a few selfies-takers, but I rarely got in anyone's way. Not everybody was snap-happy.
Emirates Woman
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Emirates Woman
Hermès Chevauchée: A bespoke riding adventure across Qatar's desertscape
Fashion by Camille Macawili 34 seconds ago Hermès hosted a private, bespoke riding adventure across the desertscape at Our Habitas Ras Abrouq, Qatar, showcasing the craftsmanship and detail of the brand's equestrian heritage. THE EXPERIENCE To truly understand the essence of Hermès is to embrace its equestrian soul. Founded in 1837 as a harness workshop, the French Maison has never strayed from its origins, elevating the art of horse riding to an unparalleled level of craftsmanship and luxury. The Hermès Chevauchée experience, intertwined with the bespoke service, is not merely about riding; it is about embracing an equestrian lifestyle infused with the Maison's signature savoir-faire and heritage of saddle-making – where craftsmanship meets performance – reflecting the brand's deep-rooted connection to equestrian sports. While Hermès does not offer direct horse-riding experiences, their commitment to the equestrian world is evident through events like the annual Saut Hermès horse show at Le Grand Palais in Paris. This particular ride was past the iconic East-West/West-East by Richard Serra in the desert of Qatar, timed to perfection at exactly sundown as only Hermès could do. The craftsmanship of their equestrian pieces is not less refined in details and like this experience, something you will treasure for life. THE CRAFTSMANSHIP Hermès has been devoted to handcrafted creations. Beyond function, an Hermès saddle is a statement of design artistry. Just as the house's coveted Birkin and Kelly bags are crafted with a dedication to detail, so too is each saddle – reflecting Hermès' dedication to equestrian excellence. Since 1837, every Hermès saddle has been handmade by a single craftsman. The collaborative journey begins with a consultation guided by a master saddler, where a seasoned rider and horse are meticulously measured. Hermès employs the cutting-edge Equiscan system, a tool designed to capture the specificities and anatomical nuances such as the exact curvature of the horse's back, ensuring a perfect fit. Once the specifications are finalised, the saddle is entrusted to a single saddle expert, who dedicates nearly 25 to 35 hours to its meticulous handcrafted labour and care. The leathers, carefully selected from Hermès' exclusive tanneries, are supple yet durable, ensuring longevity and grace in every ride. Each stitch is placed with precision, each curve moulded to enhance the intimacy between horse and rider, fostering an instinctive connection. The result of this technological precision, saddlery know-how, and time-honoured artisanal techniques? A keep-forever saddle that seamlessly blends comfort and control and elevates the riding experience to a level of unparalleled refinement and slick sporting performance – aimed at making the horse and rider as one. A testament to its craftsmanship excellence, an Hermès saddle can be repaired and adapted as it changes over time, by the same craftsman who created it. The saddles have all been numbered so they will never be forgotten – thanks to a hand-updated register – and can be traced including when and by whom the saddle was created, as well as the repairs carried out over time – a practice from the Maison since 1900. – For more on luxury lifestyle, news, fashion and beauty follow Emirates Woman on Facebook and Instagram Images: Supplied
Express Tribune
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Hermes in spotlight at Paris Fashion Week
Hermes designer Nadege Vanhee presented a fall/winter 2025 collection of glossy coats, dresses and trousers in dark-coloured leather on Saturday, showing the sleek styles on a dirt-covered runway in Paris, reported Reuters. Held at the Garde Republicaine, the sprawling stables of the French capital's mounted gendarmes or police, the fashion house built a set with curved walls that resembled a Richard Serra sculpture – but were covered in brown felt. Attendants raked the catwalk before the start of the show and the models strode out in riding boots, the toes stretched out into points, their silky hair bouncing. They paraded skirts and micro shorts with tassels, a cropped jacket with quilted panels and long coats lined with felted wool, zippers running down the back – all of it in leather. Extra layers came in the form of ribbed knit gloves that covered the arm and piles of sweaters worn like scarves around the neck and cinching outerwear. Contrasting with the mostly all-black looks were a few styles in beige, a brown marbled pattern molded into a fitted dress and a coat and trouser ensemble in bright green leather. Meanwhile, Victoria Beckham showed a line-up of sleek, monochrome looks featuring curled hems and collars for her fall/winter catwalk outing, held in a stripped down building in the centre of Paris. Models marched steadily through the bare set in square-toed shoes – some flat, others with spiked heels – parading minimalist suits with long lapels that stretched down below the navel, tapered trousers, shoulder-baring dresses and long overcoats. There were mini dresses, overcoats and suit jackets with striking, rolled-up hems, while sweaters and jackets had collars similarly curled up at the neck. Long, fluid dresses were trim, snug at the waist, contrasting with an elegant, bulked-up leather coat in taupe, worn like a minidress. Completing the looks were thick, curvy glasses and roomy tote bags. Paris Fashion Week, which brings together shows from some of the world's biggest brands, concludes on March 11.
