2023 Sculpture in the Garden Series

Virginia Overton

DATE: June 3 to October 28, 2023
TIME: Fridays & Saturdays, 10am-4pm
ABOUT THE ARTIST

Virginia Overton (b.1971, Tennessee, United States) lives and works in New York. She creates sculpture and installation, repurposing materials commonly associated with factories, farms, and construction. By means of both subtle and drastic interventions, Overton recontextualizes these ordinary objects, revealing their intrinsic properties which highlights the wear accrued by passing time. Many of her works are assembled with industrial materials that have been reconfigured to take the composition of naturalistic forms.

In 2022, Overton had solo exhibitions at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2022) and Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN. She was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022) and commissioned by the Queens Museum (New York) and the LaGuardia Arts Program to create and install a permanent installation at the Delta Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York. First exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Overton’s Untitled (Tulip) sculpture will be exhibited in Orbetello, Italy with Hypermaremma Spring 2023. In Autumn 2023  Overton will mount a solo presentation of outdoor works at Monteverdi, Italy.

Curated by Ugo Rondinone.

This exhibit was made possible by the generous support of Bortolami; the Statewide Community Regrant Program – a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Huntington Arts Council; Landcraft Environments, Ltd.; Jon Tomlinson; Traveling Wheelbarrows Masonry; and Macari Vineyards.

2022 Sculpture in the Garden Series

Sam Moyer & Eddie Martinez

DATE: June 4 to October 29, 2022
TIME: Fridays & Saturdays, 10am-4pm
EVENT DESCRIPTION: Sculpture in the Garden 2022: Sam Moyer & Eddie Martinez showcased 14 sculptures by the married couple, with 11 by Martinez and three by Moyer. The works dated from 2016-2022, and several were monumental in size. Moyer’s work were installed at the center of the garden’s “rondels” (a set of three circular arbors crafted from locust wood harvested from the property). Martinez’s Half Stepping Hot Stepper was installed in a garden room hedged by Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) at the end of a long view. A second large untitled sculpture by Martinez was installed at the center of a large flowering bed, near a Linden allée. Smaller works by Martinez were installed near the subterranean grotto, a slightly below-ground gathering place on the south side of the garden.

“Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez’s sculptures focus on interactions between the animate and inanimate, between the marriage of sculpture and soil and the ephemeral quality of light, that let us see things,” says Rondinone.

Martinez, an influential abstract painter, began creating sculpture in 2013, collecting found objects on the beaches of the North Fork of Long Island and on the streets around his Brooklyn studio, including cardboard, wood, plastic, rubber, bottle caps, and metal grills, along with such marine detritus as old buoys and lobster traps. The raw materials were arranged into improvised configurations and then cast in bronze, transforming their presence while preserving their forms. The sculptures are finished with oil, enamel, and spray paint. While nonrepresentational, they suggest human and animal forms that parallel those found in his paintings.

Ranging from four to six feet in height, Moyer’s Dependents series references codependency, and while it is understood as emotionally exploitative in human relationships, it is an essential condition of sculpture and architecture, which require systems of support such as joints, hinges, and counterweights in order to function. Moyer’s Dependents sculptures from 2021 comprise two separate entities: one made from aggregate concrete, the other a piece of Belgian Bluestone. Married by a rough hand-drawn joint, inspired by Japanese joinery, one cannot stand without the other.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, Illinois) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2005 and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2007. In Moyer’s practice, issues of scale and space are critical, and Moyer is particularly interested in the way architecture functions in tandem with her objects to create dynamic visual experiences. Uniting found textures and object in innovative ways, Moyer manipulates them into beautifully abstract formal works that provoke a new, expanded artistic vocabulary. Moyer’s first solo public art installation, Doors for Doris, commissioned by Public Art Fund, was on view at the entrance to Central Park on Doris C. Freedman Plaza last year. Her works are featured in prominent public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Morgan Library, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris. Moyer has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami; and The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; LAND, Los Angeles; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. Moyer has participated in important group exhibitions, including Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Greater New York Between Spaces at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Orient, New York.

Working in between the lines of representation and abstraction, Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, Groton, Connecticut) paints in oil, enamel, and spray paint while often incorporating found objects picked up from his studio floor, in a fast-paced practice that could be compared to automatism. Noted for his deft draftsmanship, Martinez creates large-scale works that maintain the feeling of drawings. His most apparent visual references are the CoBrA group and Abstract Expressionism. In addition to his paintings, Martinez creates found-object sculptures and works on paper. A number of his works in Sculpture in the Garden 2022 were seen recently in the exhibition Beach Bronze at Lévy Gorvy, Palm Beach and in 2018 at Frieze London in a solo booth at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. Last year, his work was on view at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Perrotin, Shanghai; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Museum exhibitions include the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China and Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit in 2019; and The Bronx Museum in New York in 2018. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Orient, New York.

2021 Sculpture in the Garden Series

Ned Smyth

DATE: June 5 to October 30, 2021
TIME: Fridays & Saturdays, 10am-4pm
EVENT DESCRIPTION: Ambulating through the four acres of the Landcraft’s botanical gardens, visitors encountered several monumental sculptures by Ned Smyth sited in dialogue with specific landscapes and the surrounding natural flora. Entitled Life, this exhibition focused on a critical juncture of Smyth’s oeuvre that he forged in the 1970s, at a moment in which he moved away from the orthodoxies of Minimalism.

The first work visitors encountered is Solomon Palm Arcade (1977)—an open-air arcade formed by four Salomon Palms cast in unadorned concrete, and carved aluminum screens (Smyth collaborated with artist Brad Davis on the aluminum carvings). Seven feet tall and sixteen feet long, standing edge to edge, Smyth’s schematically rendered palms are nestled into a rectangular “room” created by Carpinus hedging. Drawing upon ancient iconographies, Smyth’s palms evoke not only Egyptian and Greco-Roman architecture, but the symbolic meanings attributed to these forms.  One of Smyth’s signature motifs throughout his career, these palms conjure the Roman symbol for victory as well as its Christianized meaning as an emblem of triumph over sin and death.  While Smyth does not ascribe specific religious meanings to these works, he very deliberately channels the antique iconography as well as the monumental scale and timeless materials to call to mind “humanist spaces where people can be moved by beauty.”  Speaking of such architectural sculptures and installations, Smyth has explained, “I was interested in how the early Italians defined space, in the idea of a piazza, the way we look at a facade through an object in front of it.”  In the context of the Landcraft gardens, this first installation suggested to the visitor a solemn ambiance, heightening their awareness not only of the presence of the art works, but their relationship to the natural beauty that surrounds them.

After experiencing the Arcade, visitors walked further on, through a series of rondels that are formed by Locust wood arbors that were harvested from the garden.  In the center of each of the three rondels was one of Smyth’s Spiky Palm (1977-2021) sculptures.  Cast in concrete and adorned with intricate marble, glass and gold mosaics, each palm stood ten feet tall.  The sharp angular forms of the palms contrasted with the more unruly forms of the Locust wood structures which are planted with climbing pink roses and tropical vines. The palette of flowering plants was heightened by the ornate and colorful decorations of the mosaics. These stylized designs transported the viewer to an ancient reverie that conflates Roman and Byzantine archeological sites.  As one of the key proponents of the Pattern and Decoration movement, these three sculptures are emblematic of the evolution of Smyth’s work in the later part of the 1970s and early 1980s.

A final work stood at the end of the Linden Allée—a traditional line of handsome shade trees that ends in a large circle. A single, monumental Solomon Palm (1983) covered in black and terracotta stone mosaics majestically stood at the terminus of the allée. Its exuberant decoration was the perfect foil to the rigorously pruned trees whose summertime canopy fills out and creates a tranquil corridor along this part of the garden. Abandoning the austerity of Minimalism, Smyth’s mosaic sculpture channeled the complex dialogue between nature and culture into a single icon.

“Ned Smyth is an artist whose work connects us with our sources in the natural world—it’s beauty and terrors and mysteries and connotations.” explains exhibition curator Ugo Rondinone. “His palm tree sculptures are not only an investigation of the mutable potential of sculpture as both a physical medium and a site of rich cultural disclosure in art, but also a celebration of life; its seasons and rhythms, its plants and stones with which we share the planet and our own wildlife.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ned Smyth emerged on the New York art scene in the early 1970s at a time when Minimalist sculpture was giving way to more narrative forms of art making.  His oeuvre was informed in part by his immersion in art history through his upbringing as the son of a well-known art historian father, as well as through his proximity to the reigning artists of the New York scene—Gordon Matta Clark, Carl Andre, and Frank Stella.  Smyth began exhibiting in 1973, making a name for himself with his architecturally scaled, cast concrete sculptures, mosaics and public art installations. More recently, Smyth has further deepened his engagement with nature, moving back toward the pure forms of found stones and wood in his most recent series.

His work has been exhibited in private galleries and museums around the world, including at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Parrish Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art to name but a few of the institutions who have hosted Smyth’s work. Ned Smyth was born 1948 in New York City; he lives and works on Shelter Island.