Intricate and colorful creations bloom out of the grounds, facade, and exhibit spaces at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. Utilizing everything from natural materials like coconut bark to industrial metals like wire-brushed bronze, nearly two dozen artists created a variety of works to make up A Garden of Promise and Dissent.
Among them is Gracelee Lawrence, a New York-based sculptor specializing in 3D-printed pieces. Three of Lawrence’s creations dot the grounds of the Aldrich, with additional work inside the space. One piece, titled Emotional Weather Forecast (2022), hangs on the facade of the building near the entrance. Long trails of glass beads lined up in a row create a visual of an orange figure against greenery, juxtaposing the solid building in the background. According to Lawrence, each bead represents one pixel of an original digital image they created.
Many see the digital world – the desktop of a computer, the face of a smartwatch, the Instagram homepage – as something removed from reality; fuzzy icons that float in a nebulous cloud. To Lawrence, those spaces are as real as any spot of grass their sculptures are placed on top of. The process behind their work highlights the digital as a reality, which they believe helps create a better relationship with the digital overall, including online spaces.
“I think it's not social media, it's not technology. Those aren't the things that are bad or wrong. It's how they're being implemented in our lack of understanding the structures behind them,” said Lawrence.
In doing their work, they said they primarily use low-cost, open-source tools to understand exactly what they’re doing. “So, the more freedom of tinkering and change, and maybe grassroots work on those platforms, perhaps more change there could be.”
WSHU sat down with the artist to learn more about the purpose behind the process.
WSHU: Gracelee, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Tell me about one of the multiple pieces you have at the Aldrich right now. It's called Emotional Weather Forecast, and it's hanging against the facade of the building.
GL: Right now, I have what I call a bead curtain, which is a part of my practice where I take a screenshot of a digital environment that I've made and then translate that so that each pixel equals one glass bead. So it is an 11 by seven-foot moving glass bead image of a kind of falling orange figure in this landscape of green, kind of indeterminate lush grasses. So it has a really wonderful way of dealing with wind and an environmental movement. And not only wind but also the way that light in different types of day reacts with the piece. The glass is very responsive. So, the nature of the colors and refraction change over the course of the day.
WSHU: This translation you talk about from the digital to the physical is really pronounced and literal, with one pixel equaling one bead – say more about that relationship.
GL: It's very present in all of my work. I think so much about the physical-to-digital, digital-to-physical kind of reciprocal translation because that is the world in which I live. Most of us in the 21st century, globally, are living between these realities and between these places. And I really think of them as places – digital space as a place, not just as a frivolity or as this kind of secondary version of reality. It is just as valid as any other version of reality. And so, the way that my objects behave is meant to deal with the question of the convergence of realities. So the digital and the physical coming together kind of in this collaborative method of making the work is a part of how I talk about this, this strange tension that we're all trapped between digital and physicalness.
WSHU: I want to get more into that tension between the digital and the physical spaces. Many people, including lawmakers, are getting increasingly nervous about the effects of the digital world. How do you and your work relate to the topic
GL: If we think of digital space as something that's an exception or that's not real, it's much easier to fall into this pattern of, yeah, perhaps overuse or not understanding boundaries of that space because we don't have as much of a social understanding of the reality of that space and the implications of that space. So, I think that it's one way that I try to question my own relationship between those spaces. And I hope that it also allows other people to do so. Because so much of what I think about in my work is that the digital and the physical have essentially equal presence and importance in most people's daily lives. So, we spend a huge amount of time in those spaces, and I think they need to be treated like spaces we're visiting rather than as secondary concerns.
The exterior portion of A Garden of Promise and Dissent opened to the public on Nov. 17, 2024, and will remain throughout November of the following year.
