North Carolina Museum of Art

COMMISSIONED WORKS ENHANCE DEFYING GRAVITY EXHIBITION
Installations Include Chamber for the Trees and Sky, Flight Wind Reeds
And Rabble, a Fighter Jet Formed from Mylar Butterflies

RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina Museum of Art has commissioned several internationally known artists to create three new works of monumental proportions in conjunction with the exhibition Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight (Nov. 2, 2003–March 7, 2004). The works will be installed throughout this year and will continue on view as part of the Museum's permanent collection.

London-based environmental artist Chris Drury completed the first project in April: Chamber for the Trees and Sky in the forested Museum Preserve. Bill and Mary Buchen of New York will install their 25-foot-tall Flight Wind Reeds, a work of "sonic architecture," in early May. And the Boston-based team of Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schecter will fashion more than 1,000 Mylar butterflies into the shape of an X-35 fighter jet beginning in mid-September.

"These three works are large-scale, very ambitious projects," said exhibition co-curator Linda Johnson Dougherty, the Museum's adjunct associate curator of contemporary art. "The artists will specifically address the theme of aviation, but the power of their works also promises to provide great resonance beyond the centennial celebration."

Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight is the nation's most ambitious contemporary art exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' historic 1903 flight. The exhibition is co-curated by Dougherty and by Huston Paschal, the Museum's associate curator of modern art. Defying Gravity is presented by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina and supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Chris Drury joins art, science and the environment in his recently constructed "cloud chamber" in the Museum Preserve. One of the world's leading environmental artists, Drury has used natural materials to create both temporary and permanent sculpture in the landscape in projects all around the world. The Museum's project is the newest in Drury's series of cloud chambers, and the first of his cloud chambers in the U.S.

The octagon-shaped structure—approximately 12 feet in diameter and formed with stone walls and a log roof—serves as an oversized camera obscura, or pinhole camera, with a small aperture in the roof projecting the sky and clouds above onto the floor and walls of the chamber below. The structure is located adjacent to a trail winding into the Museum Preserve.

"I wanted to find a location where you can look up and see the trees going up and framing the sky," said Drury. "And you put the chamber under that with just an aperture to project the image onto the floor. So you have this experience of going down into the earth, down into the darkness, and there on the floor is the sky—which would relate to the Museum's show about flight and the sky."

Bill and Mary Buchen, a husband-and-wife team based in New York, have also explored the theme of aviation in previous works—kinetic sound sculptures powered by the wind and termed sonic architecture. Their outdoor installation for the Museum, Flight Wind Reeds, was specifically inspired by the aerial stunts performed by Russian pilots, who fly their planes at 700 miles per hour and then cut the engines off, causing the planes to flip up and backward. The sleek, aerodynamic Flight Wind Reeds—five elements, each 25 feet tall, composed of aluminum poles topped with stainless steel forms that reference elements of flight—perform a similar stunt: spinning and then flipping up in response to the movement of the wind. As these works turn, pivot and spin, and the bells attached to each piece make music, Flight Wind Reeds will, in curator Dougherty's words, "render visible the invisible: the motion, speed, sound and physical energy of the wind."

"Sonic architecture refers to the form or shape of the acoustic field generated by our artworks," explained Mary Buchen. "That field is dependent upon natural phenomena. In the case of the Flight Wind Reeds, the acoustic field—the movement of the reeds and the range and direction of the radiating bell sounds—is constantly changing as the wind "plays" the structures and generates a 'soundscape.'' "

Flight Wind Reeds will be installed on a grassy hill near the Museum's front entrance during the exhibition and will afterward be moved to a lower field of the Museum Park.

The third of Defying Gravity's monumental permanent installations, Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter's Rabble brings visitors inside the Museum. In a two-story atrium just beyond the Museum's entrance, the artists will suspend more than 1,000 custom-designed Mylar butterflies from the Museum ceiling, arranging them to form the image of Lockheed Martin's experimental X-35 joint strike fighter jet. Combining art and technology with a focus on elements of visual perception, Helmick and Schechter have termed their artwork "three-dimensional pointillism."

"The X-35 will likely be the last manned fighter jet created for the U.S. military, so it's a plane that appropriately bookends the Wright brothers' 1903 flyer, the first manned plane," said Stuart Schechter. Collaborater Ralph Helmick noted the collision of the military imagery of the fighter jet with late 1960s' peace imagery—the butterfly.

More than a dozen species of butterflies are embedded within the more than 1,000 individual creations, adding depth to the complete installation. While the artists have worked with the theme of flight before—as in the giant red cardinal they created out of 1,800 small airplanes for Chicago's Midway Airport—Rabble marks the first time the artists have incorporated kinetic elements into one of their works: Thanks to technological innovations, the butterflies in Rabble (the word designates a group of butterflies, just as flock designates a group of birds) will actually flutter their wings at regular intervals, adding a new dimension of vitality to the sculpture.

"In each of these three commissioned works, artists have offered a unique perspective on man's fascination with flight and with the sky— and with our timeless desire to fly," said curator Linda Johnson Dougherty. "These pieces serve as signature works for the Defying Gravity show—beautiful, thoughtful, even provocative, inviting visitors into the full exhibition and expanding on themes they will find throughout the show."

Admission is charged for Defying Gravity. For tickets or information, call the Museum Box Office at (919) 715-5923.

The presenting sponsor for the exhibition is Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. This project is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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