Stroll Garden
Hung-up Gardens
(Excerpted from a catalog essay by Giovanni Intra)
“Heian shrine stroll garden/Azure vista, 1999, the major work in this exhibition at Works On Paper, Inc., combines ideas of the view, the hole in the view, and movement (the mobile).
The holes in Heian shrine stroll garden/Azure vista are taken from constructed ponds around which the Heian Stroll Garden is laid out and Bryant has expanded upon the scheme significantly. Creating a hanging, billowing landscape for the plot of the gallery, the artist has excised the bodies of water from the Japanese garden, cut their profiles into this generic lakeshore landscape, and suspended these phantom ponds in front of the picture place as a mobile. The mobile, invented by Calder, is a “tajectory,” a narrative of movement. A picture plane drawn and quartered, the mobile is made to contend with three-dimensional space, becoming a pictorial geometry to walk around and experience. The art gallery as stroll garden.”
