ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jonathan Borofsky

Jonathan Borofsky makes art that sometimes comes from his dreams. The dreamlike, unreal nature of some of his sculptures is emphasized by their scale—huge human figures much taller than real people. The first thing visitors to the Seattle Museum of Art see is Borofsky’s well-known Hammering Man moving his mechanical arm, installed on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. I Dreamed I Could Fly consists of several life-sized fiberglass people hanging from a ceiling. One of them, more than five feet tall, will be suspended in the Museum’s Defying Gravity exhibition.

Bill and Mary Buchen

Bill and Mary Buchen are a husband-and-wife team of artists. They are also musicians and are interested in the sounds of many unusual instruments. They call their works of art “sonic architecture” because they combine characteristics of building structures, sculpture and sounds. The Buchens are also interested in science and the nature of environments. Many of their projects have been commissioned for outdoor public places such as parks and playgrounds, where wind interacts with the works to move them or create sound.

Flight Wind Reeds was created for the Defying Gravity exhibition. It is an example of site-specific art, since it was designed to suit its location. Currently in front of the Museum, it will find a permanent home after the exhibition somewhere in the Museum Park.

The shape and motion of this work were inspired by Russian fighter jets that fly at hundreds of miles per hour and flip over when the pilots cut the engines. The complete work consists of five 25-foot poles topped by weathervane-like rods that end in the abstract shape of a fighter jet. The rods spin and go up and down gently when a strong wind blows outside the Museum. Bells attached to the rods make a soft tinkling sound when they move.

Albert Chong

Albert Chong was born in Jamaica and now lives in the United States. He is fascinated by the human dream of being able to fly like birds. His work in the exhibition, Winged Evocations, seems to give people this ability. The five figures wear leather jackets covered with pinecones, like prickly armor. Each one has the artist’s own face, cast in bronze with dreadlocks, and the feet of birds. Gooselike wings are attached, and they actually “fly” when activated by the motors from Nissan’s Datsun 210 windshield wipers. The artist placed one hundred pounds of feathers around them as a base.

In the words of the artist, “Every child has been awe struck when observing for the first time the flight of birds. I would dare say that every human alive who has ever observed birds in flight has experienced a deep envy of these creatures . . . [of] the miracle of the motion they perform in often exuberant defiance of the laws and notions of gravity. Enslaved to the laws of physics, we would not achieve flight until the early 20th century and then only by mechanical means.”

Brent Cole

Brent Cole works in several media, including glass blowing, an ancient method of shaping blobs of melted glass into colorful, elegant vases, bowls and sculptures. That traditional process is very different from the technological one used in Flight, a sculptural multimedia assemblage in the exhibition. Flight combines a number of found objects such as a camera dolly wheelbase, chairs and a backpack frame. When the artist demonstrates the work, he lies down, suspended in its harness, and seems to have wings.

With the help of a helicopter, Cole recorded the view that visitors would see if they were flying through the exhibition and out over the Museum grounds. In the work Cole uses a DVD to project this aerial journey onto a screen visitors may watch. Brent Cole lives in Burnsville, in the North Carolina mountains.

Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter

Helmick and Schechter are a team who work in the Boston, Massachusetts, area. They are unusual partners because Helmick was trained as an artist and Schechter as a rocket scientist. Schechter’s engineering background is useful for some of the large-scale projects he and Helmick create. His practical work includes airborne programs at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Helmick and Schechter combine qualities of both science and art in their projects.

Several Helmick and Schechter works consist of many small figures precisely suspended in air. When viewed from a distance, all the small pieces together resemble another, larger object. Rara Avis (Rare Bird), for example, inside Chicago’s Midway Airport, consists of more than 1,800 tiny flying machines in cast pewter set at the end of stainless-steel cables. At a distance, the whole group takes on the form of a flying bird. Rabble, commissioned by the Museum for the exhibition, is a permanent addition to the Museum’s collection. Somewhat different from their original computer image of an airplane shown in a Museum gallery, the final 30-foot work resembles an X-35 fighter jet, which Schechter believes may be the last human-piloted fighter jet. It consists of hundreds of small butterflies of several species, made of lightweight Mylar film. The individual butterflies actually move their wings. The word rabble has the little-used meaning of a swarm of butterflies.

Yvonne Jacquette

When Yvonne Jacquette selects a seat on an airplane, it is always by a window. She uses these opportunities to sketch the view below. For several years she has used her sketches to paint landscapes seen from the perspective of the sky. In most cases her paintings are close to her sketches of the landscapes as she observed them. In Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite II, owned by the Museum, she has selected elements she observed from several different sketches of the New York City–Newark, New Jersey, area and changed them. This process results in a “composite” image. This is the second version of the composition, which has less detail and fewer, softer colors than the first one. The result is part reality and part abstraction.

Rosemary Laing

Australian Rosemary Laing has studied and created works related to flight since 1994. She came to understand the mechanics of flight after working with Qantas airlines and with NASA. She is particularly fascinated with human bodies that seem to fly through space. She wrote, “Flight sits in our consciousness as a kind of fantasy or dream. . . . Children dream of flying. It is a very escapist notion to be able to fly. Superheroes fly. . . . I was interested in unfettering the body from the mechanics of flight.”

Laing’s very large photographs (about four to eight feet in width) in her flight research series show a woman who seems effortlessly suspended or flying high in the sky. The photographer has revealed she worked with a stunt performer to make the images. The woman is wearing a white wedding dress. Laing carefully prepared and staged the situations, but she did not manipulate the pictures artificially. Exactly how she did this is kept a secret to allow the viewer’s imagination free reign to interpret the beauty and the soaring freedom of the images.

Laing’s photographs are C-prints, or chromogenic photographs. In this process, the color dyes are added chemically during the developing. The largest example in the exhibition, flight research #5, is 101 1/2 inches wide. It was recently purchased for the Museum’s collection.

Donald Lipski

Donald Lipski’s sculptures are among several works in Defying Gravity that take apart or reassemble parts of airplanes and other objects into something new. In his search for material, Lipski found parts discarded at the Grumman Aero-space salvage yard on Long Island. Broken Wings #3 is a wall-hung sculpture that combines an aeronautical pod housing, buckets, periscopes and other parts. Baby Z includes an aviator’s helmet and an artillery shell shipping case.

Panamarenko

Panamarenko is an artist so devoted to ideas of flight that he created a name for himself based on the Pan American Airlines Company. At a young age this Belgian experimenter began to examine various technological materials as objects of play. For more than three decades, he has created sculptures resembling all sorts of fantastic machines of locomotion such as versions of airplanes, cars, balloons, a giant flying saucer and submarines. He keeps these in a hangar built for his work, like ordinary airplanes. Panamarenko’s inventions are the results of his thoughts on questions of physics and philosophy. They often include actual motors, as does his 17-foot, 7-inch airplane, Raven’s Variable Matrix.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Robert ParkeHarrison creates photographic images using props to help invent the world that he shows. He appears in his photos wearing a black suit. His pictures make the world seem like life in a myth. They explore technology and poetic ideas that involve taking care of the damaged earth. Robert ParkeHarrison was born in 1968 and now teaches at Holy Cross College. Shana ParkeHarrison, his wife, often works on the images, including those in this exhibition, but sometimes does not list herself as the artist.

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber went to Kuwait after the 1991war with Iraq. The French photographer recorded views there of the war-scarred landscape, sometimes taking her pictures from military aircraft. She witnessed widespread destruction in areas still smoldering with oil well fires. When seen from a distance, the images have an abstract quality that deceives the viewer into perceiving them as beautiful forms, but with closer examination, they reveal the destruction of conflict. Ristelheuber grouped 71 photographs titled FAIT, a French word meaning both fact and done. Each photograph is about 51 inches wide. Together they fill a large gallery. The exhibition brings a selection of six of the FAIT photographs to North Carolina. They are C-prints, or chromogenic photographs.

Leo Rubinfien

Leo Rubinfien has traveled and photographed in many of the world’s countries. He lived several years in Japan and has written about Asian art and culture. Like Sophie Ristelhueber and Rosemary Laing, Rubinfien likes the medium of the C-print. He has published some of his work in books, including 10 Takeoffs 5 Landings. The two photographs mentioned in these lesson plans capture airplane passengers in quiet moments of the long passage over the Pacific Ocean to and from Asia.

John Schabel

John Schabel's Untitled (Passengers) is a series of black-and-white photographs of air travelers taken from the opposite vantage point of Leo Rubinfien: outside the airplanes still on the runway. His fascination, Schabel says, grew out of that moment when passengers are powerless to do anything but wait for takeoff. He likes best views that present unclear situations, such as those obscured by rain. He made the Passengers photographs at night, when he could see travelers in the planes’ interior lights but they could not see him.

“I think of the Passenger photographs as portraits,” he wrote. “The passenger is unaware and locked inside an airplane, and the photographer is maybe a hundred yards away in the dark. . . . I mean, that's what was fascinating to me about that situation with the person locked inside an airplane. . . . I think whatever the person in the window is feeling is not necessarily captured in the photograph, but what the viewer brings to it is maybe their own feeling of that familiar situation.”

Roman Signer

Swiss artist Roman Signer blows things up. He does this in a carefully controlled setting in order to record the action of explosion, smoke and motion as a filmed work of art. He is also interested in the way ordinary objects move through the air and in their appearance on Super-8 film or video. The image in this student portfolio is a still from a four-minute video titled Bett (Bed).

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