Latest news with #RichardSerra
Vogue
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Ready for a Sculpture Park Summer? Here Are the Best Outdoor Art Venues to Visit Around the World
If you ever needed proof of the increasing interest in sculpture parks right now consider the fact that Charli XCX chose one of the best sculpture parks in the world, Storm King Art Center—an hour's drive from NYC in the Hudson Valley—over a sweaty nightclub as the site to relaunch her remix album last fall, declaring to her fans, 'We're fine art bitches now!' Sure, displaying sculpture in an outdoor setting has existed ever since Neanderthals would arrange rocks to create ring-like sculptures in caves; but the emergence of outdoor sculpture parks in the 1960s and 1970s was in part a response to finding a setting to display abstract and often monumental work by artists such as Richard Serra and Alexander Calder. By moving to an open-air environment, sculpture was freed from the confines of the traditional white cube gallery setting and a merging of art and nature started to take place. Today, there are over 300 sculpture parks in the US alone which saw an uptick in popularity during the Covid pandemic that has only increased in the years since. The opportunity of viewing art in a natural landscape democratizes the viewing experience as well as challenging us to see it anew. As an ambitious new sculpture park opens in Spain this month, we take a look at some of our favorite sculpture parks around the world. Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, New York, US)
Harpers Bazaar Arabia
19-06-2025
- Harpers Bazaar Arabia
Why The ‘Our Habitas Ras Abrouq' Camp Is Our Ultimate Quiet Travel Trend Destination
The world of travel has taken a quiet turn for all the right reasons, so switch off your devices and try a travel option of a different kind Approximately 80km west of Doha among an expanse of white sand dunes, adventurers are met with a remarkable sculpture by the American artist Richard Serra. East-West/West-East consists of four steel plates, each more than 14 metres tall, arranged in a linear pattern stretching more than a kilometre. Some say it represents the passage of time. For others, it's a symbol of hope. Whatever its meaning, it invites a moment of quiet contemplation. Those making the pilgrimage are likely to make their base at Our Habitas Ras Abrouq, a recently opened luxury camp 20 minutes' drive from the sculpture. Hot on the heels of Our Habitas AlUla, a game-changing eco-friendly enterprise in Saudi Arabia's Ashar Valley, Ras Abrouq located in the UNESCO-protected Al-Reem Biosphere Reserve invites guests to unwind where the desert meets the sea. The founders have gone all in on the 'quiet travel' trend. Forty-two villas range from one to four bedrooms, each with its own private pool and vast outdoor deck delivering uninterrupted views of the Arabian Gulf. Then there are the activities to consider: guided meditations through the desert, sound ceremonies conducted under the stars, vibroacoustic massage. Guests are invited to try ancient traditions such as the clay pottery, calligraphy and Al Sadu weaving. 'With the world getting louder, it's increasingly hard to find corners of quiet – and it's increasingly important,' says general manager Mohammed Wazir. 'What we offer at Ras Abrouq is a secluded sanctuary that encourages guests to step away from everyday distractions and embrace a slower, more purposeful way of being.' Search for the term 'quiet travel' and you'll find entire websites devoted to the detrimental effects of noise and the healing benefits of quiet. The quiet travel trend is in direct alignment with the 'digital minimalism' movement, which is gaining traction internationally thanks to the American computer science professor and author Cal Newport. In his book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Cal argues for more intentional use of technology – removing apps that are not crucial tools and only picking up your smartphone when it's absolutely essential. The quest for quiet hasn't gone unnoticed by the luxury travel industry. More and more hotels are advertising 'no TVs in rooms' and 'no Wi-Fi in communal areas.' 'We have definitely seen a rise in demand for 'quiet trips' among our HNW clients,' says Aurelia van Lynden, head of travel at Pelorus, a travel company specialising in bespoke remote adventure. 'Time is a precious commodity and this style of trip allows people to disconnect from their day-to-day and reconnect not only with the ones they are travelling with but also with themselves – and their surroundings. Our world is loud with endless pings and chatter. We help our clients cut through the noise, whether that be a private camp in the middle of nowhere, hiking untouched paths basking in the scenery or on board their own private yacht exploring remote islands.' Silent safaris, off -grid Nordic adventures, Antarctic voyages and sleeping under the stars in Oman are among Pelorus' most popular offerings. Tom Barber, co-founder of Original Travel, says: 'There's been a lot of emphasis of late on dark sky destinations, where there is no light pollution and you can appreciate the wonders of the night sky, but we're also seeing growing demand from clients who want to avoid noise pollution. For this reason, Original Travel launched a 'pin drop collection' of places where you can literally hear a pin drop. Speaking from personal experience, Tom says: 'I will never forget the sound of silence in the NamibRand desert in Namibia. I was driven out to a beautiful viewpoint and left there to soak up the panoramic views and total absence of sounds with a cool bag of drinks. It's places like these that make you realise just how much noise most of us are bathed in especially in urban environments. There's rarely a moment of silence. For me, that makes the occasional stay somewhere off -grid, where the only thing deafening is the silence, so special.' Solitude is the subject of Lonely Planet's latest book The Joy of Quiet Places. A comprehensive guide to the world's most serene places, it offers expert guidance and travel tips. In his foreword, the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, the first person to reach the South Pole solo and author of Silence: In the Age of Noise: A Meditation on the Importance of Silence in a World Filled with Noise and Distractions, writes: 'Silence contains a quality more exclusive and long lasting than the more ordinary luxuries.' 'Quiet is not a luxury – it is a human necessity,' argues acoustic ecologist and co-founder of Quiet Parks International, Gordon Hempton. Having spent the past three decades roaming rainforests, coastlines and deserts in order to record the sounds of nature, he's one of the world's leading experts on the subject. 'Taking a break from noise is essential for your health. In quiet places, stress levels decrease, one can think more clearly, problems appear less complex, people score higher on cognitive tests and they also become more creative and successful at home and work.' Dr Laura Walton, a clinical psychologist and PADI Instructor, who has dedicated her career to studying the psychology of deep-sea diving is in firm agreement. 'Descending into the depths on a scuba dive, one can only hear bubbles. The silence hushes the noise in our heads. Mind chatter reduces and we can focus on the present, paying attention to our dive and the environment around us. Many say diving is their therapy.' Safari outfits are jumping on the bandwagon too. 'We've noticed growing demand for spa safaris and meditation safaris, which put the emphasis on wellness,' says Julian Carter- Manning, founder of Yellow Zebra Safaris, a travel company specialising in tailor-made expert-guided safaris across Africa. 'We are increasingly steering clients towards quieter, less crowded destinations and activities that align with the quiet travel trend.' At the more extreme (and colder) end of the spectrum, you'll find White Desert, a carbon-neutral luxury camp outfit in Antarctica (accessible via private jet). Here, guests not only enjoy the privilege of total quiet (snow absorbs sound better than anything else), they get to experience what it feels like to be the only people on the planet. Let's not overlook the exhilarating daily excursions, six-course gourmet meals and one-on-one sessions with an on-site biokineticist. Prices start from Dhs252,000 per person for a six-day tour. Not convinced? Let me leave you with this thought. In a truly quiet location, it's possible to listen to more than 1,000 square miles at once. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?
Evening Standard
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Pavel Kolesnikov & Samson Tsoy: 'Music is like a workout for the soul'
I ask whether they notice the coughs, the wrappers rustling in the hall? 'The energy of the audience is key,' Tsoy says. 'We saw this during Covid, playing for broadcasts from empty venues. It was excruciatingly difficult, almost impossible.' The stage, he adds, 'is not a physical stage. It is the attention of people'. That attention is being reshaped by digital technology — a subject of Tsoy's recent project, an homage to Richard Serra's The Matter of Time installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Digital life tends to flatten time, making each moment indistinguishable from the next, but Serra's space, Tsoy says, 'changes the way you feel time. It stretches it, restoring its texture and presence. I want to make music that helps shift your inner clock, to slow you down.' Kolesnikov laughs. 'Art is a kind of harmless drug, a magic mushroom,' he says. 'It can warp time.'
CBC
04-06-2025
- 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.
