Exhibition of Janet Echelman’s 1.26 in CivicCenter extended through second week in August.
DENVER, CO - The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs (DOCA) is pleased to announce Janet Echelman as the selected artist to create a monumental temporary installation in Civic Center Park commemorating the first Biennial of the Americas, July 1-August 11, 2010.
Entitled 1.26, the artwork engages with issues of temporality and interconnectedness surrounding the 1.26-microsecond shortening of the day that resulted from the February 2010 Chile earthquake’s redistribution of the earth’s mass. Echelman is constructing a large netted aerial sculpture - inspired by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) simulation of the earthquake’s ensuing tsunami—that will float high above the traffic of downtown Denver, suspended between Civic Center’s Greek Amphitheatre and the DenverArt Museum. The art is designed to move dynamically, choreographed by the wind. At night, a looped program of colored light will illuminate the sculpture, an interpretation of sunrise-to-sunset colorimeter readings of days in Santiago and Denver.
Janet Echelman’s installation is the City of Denver’s signature commission to celebrate the re-awakening of Civic Center Park and to mark the inaugural Biennial of the Americas.
The artwork translates two epiphenomena of the Chilean earthquake—its impacts on the day's length and the ocean's surface—into a dynamic visual form to underscore the interdependence of earth systems and the global community as revealed by natural disasters.
In the course of researching 1.26, Echelman consulted with scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NOAACenter for Tsunami Research to obtain data in order to create the first three-dimensional model of the tsunami. Using her proprietary net-building software, the artist transformed an outline of the tsunami’s higher amplitude area into a netted sculptural form, which is being woven with Spectra® fiber, one of the world's strongest and lightest manmade fibers. The sculpture’s lightweight structure is optimized for taking the form of wind patterns, and is engineered to withstand gusts up to 90 mph. This was accomplished using original software that calculates the sum of wind loads on each of the quarter-million knots and half-million yarn lengths as the net deflects in the wind.
1.26 was commissioned by DOCA’s Public Art Program, and will be installed by July 1, 2010 through the artist’s collaboration with a team of award-winning engineers, architects, artists, fabricators and installers. The artwork will be on display for the entire month of July.
Through her art, Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental public sculptures that respond to environmental forces including wind, water and sunlight. This past year, the artist inaugurated two major art commissions in North America: Water Sky Garden for the Richmond Olympic Oval, an official venue for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, and the monumental new civic icon for Phoenix, Arizona, Her Secret is Patience. Exhibitions of Echelman’s paintings, prints and sculpture have been held in Venice, Madrid, Bombay, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Kyoto and New York City. She is the recipient of the Harvard Graduate School of Design Loeb Fellowship, the Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, a Fulbright Lectureship, as well as grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Japan Foundation, Rotary International Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She currently serves on the national board of the Fulbright Association and the Aspen Institute Energy and Environment Awards. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband and their two children.
For more information on DOCA’s Public Art Program, please call 720-865-4313 or visit www.denvergov.org/publicart .
