source: leeboroson

Landscape is a construct, a very particular point of reference to view the natural world. “Universal Solvent” considers the containment of landscape through the sculptural representation of elemental forces in nature, reassembling these components in one environment. These works take the natural out of context, both in site and material to investigate how this affects issues of denial, appropriation, ownership. In creating these works, I face the impossible task of capturing natural phenomena that are visually “real” yet substantively ineffable, transient or evanescent. These are forms that are driven by various forces to have shape, their configurations are always in flux. The sculptures are concrete and descriptive (abstract), but not deceptive. They consider the ability of one material to talk about the condition or state of another material or substance, often uncovering and exposing naturally occurring patterns that generate form. The works continues my exploration of cultural affect on perception of the natural world.

Universal Solvent is an installation composed of six sculptures. Canopy is an inflatable structure based on images of volcanic eruptions and burning oil wells. Project is built as three separate “plumes” that connect in a crypt-like structure when installed. Surround is composed of clear urethane castings of a rendering of the surface of water. Outpouring is a waterfall like structure made of 2000 rayon tassels. In Probes, the small objects are facsimiles of icebergs, depicted in photos found on the Internet. Tumult is a cut and tiled image composed of 20 c-prints. The photos are of Koi swarming near the surface of a pond. Mobro, (Garbage Barge) is a scale replica of the “Garbage Barge” created from news photos taken in 1987 when the Mobro 4000 traveled for six months searching for a landfill that would accept its load of NY garbage.
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source: tangskidmoreedu

The eighth installment of the Opener series featured seven large-scale works by Brooklyn-based artist Lee Boroson. Since 1995, Boroson has been known for his room-filling, inflated sculptures made of sewn-nylon and kept aloft by electric blowers. These colorful enclosures find inspiration in both natural and man-made sources, and many respond to their specific installation sites. One such work, Integument, a buoyant piece designed for the Tang’s vestibule, implicitly compared an often-overlooked section of the building to a layer of skin. Pleasure Grounds, an inflated environment of lily pad-like forms, and Dewpoint, an accumulation of thousands of tiny glass spheres that formed a hanging cloud, offered amalgams of the manufactured and the magical, while Lucky Storm (2) transformed the Tang’s gallery space with streaming sunbeams of fine nylon threads. Other works in the exhibition grew from the microscopic to the macrocosmic, such as a meticulously manipulated twelve-foot square photograph that attempts to picture the visible night sky with all of its black space removed. Each of the works in Outer Limit commented playfully on “the space in-between”—the space in which our lives take place.