Sculptures Unveiled At LongHouse

Proclaimed sculpture artists Helmut Lang, Alyson Shotz, and Dustin Yellin have unveiled works at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.

To offer a fresh perspective to the artwork and the garden, LongHouse moves the placement of several works from time to time. Work by artists Toshiko Takaezu, Atsuya Tominga, and Johnny Swing will be moved throughout the garden. LongHouse bids farewell to several works by artists Ronald Bladen, John Crawford, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Larry Rivers. The reserve also introduces new artwork by Gustavo Bonevardi, Orly Gener, and Judith Shea.

Indy spoke with Lang, Shotz, and Yellin about the unveiling.

Lang’s art explores the fertile space between abstraction and figuration. His sculpture twenty-two, on display in the gardens, simultaneously evokes the spinal column and the segmented body of the annelid (earthworm), and like may of Lang’s works, references the scale of the human body.

“The piece could resemble a tribe, a gathering, or a pagan grouping of fykes,” said Lang. “It invites the viewer to consider the body less as a hierarchy of limbs and organs, but as a meshwork of equivalent and interchangeable elements.”

The objects he creates have an intense physicality that evokes the human body and human condition while essentially remaining abstract.

“I started to work on this sculpture without an end-result in mind,” he continued. “I just let it evolve on its own. I decided to have the artwork comprise of a gathering of 22 columns, as twenty-two became its title after a Google search about the population of East Hampton town, which is 22,000 people,” he told the Independent.

Working on the East End also inspires the artist. “The inspiration comes from the environmental circumstances, the light, and its unique conditions. I work as much out here as I can year-round.”

Yellin is a visual artist who lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He is well known for his larger-than-life sculptures that use multiple layers of glass, each tier made of cut out imagery from printed materials creating a three-dimensional collage.

He has presented public exhibitions for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the New York City Ballet’s Art Series.

In a departure from Yellin’s glass mosaics, LongHouse is exhibiting two rockets: Bathroom Rocket, 2018 and Garbage Can Rocket, 2018, along the axis of David’s Way. His inspiration for the piece? “Gravitational fields tracing fractal patterns in the water. The very first flush of the first toilet on Mars. Moorish Architecture. The Information Revolution,” Yellin told Indy.

Yellin will also receive the LongHouse Award on July 21 during the LongHouse benefit LongHouse Celebrates Brooklyn.

Shotz studied geology before becoming an artist. “I’m interested in making objects that change infinitely, depending on their surroundings, the light at different times of day, the weather, the seasons,” she said.

Crushed Cubes, installed at LongHouse on the island of weeping cherry trees by Peter’s Pond, are welded and painted steel cubes that were crushed in a scrap yard metal crusher.

“My studio is located very close to a metal scrap yard. Each day I see the metal crushing and mountains of crushed metal, and it’s totally fascinating,” said Shotz.

Shotz is interested in using the raw materials of the earth and seeing what happens when they are subjected to gravity and other forces. “Through sculpture, I engage in an artistic investigation into the physics of space, light, and matter, the building blocks of our physical world. I consider these to be my primary materials,” she said.

Visit www.longhouse.org.

jessica@indyeastend.com
@hamptondaze