The spirit can be anesthetized by the visual and emotional landscapes we pass though daily, the asphalt gutter, the linoleum floor at the office, the spackled ceiling of the bathroom. None sustain much enthusiasm. Providing an antidote to the rut, large scale art installations arouse awe and refresh the spirit, stimulating the imagination with novelty, and engulfing one’s awareness to create a very present moment. Imagine standing in the Takino Rainbow Nest, by fiber artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam, who constructed the piece pictured below with crocheted nylon.
In its Renwick gallery, the Smithsonian has such an exhilarating and impressive exhibit aptly called Wonder. It includes large scale installations emulating the natural world, owing to the fact that few things strike awe in us as does nature.
It is the collision of nature and elements of childhood that give an exhibit like this one overwhelming emotional force. In her article on the Smithsonian’s show, NPR’s Elizabeth Blair explains “When you were a little kid, everyday objects could be amazing — twigs, bugs, old tires, there was potential in everything. And it’s that sense of awe that the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery is trying to recapture in its new show, Wonder.” Combining these small magical relics of childhood and nature in grand and impressive fashion overwhelms whatever trappings of adulthood one might try to cling to while visiting a gallery like the Smithsonian. And speaking of twigs, participating artist John Grade and an army of volunteers made a plaster cast of a living tree 140 years old, and recreated the behemoth using 500,000 pieces of reclaimed wood, now suspended from the ceiling in the Wonder exhibit.
Blair is right about the magic of everyday objects in one’s early youth, but I’d go a step farther and say the massive presence of such installations elicit a sense of childhood because that was a formative period when everything seemed big and new. In childhood, installations are ubiquitous, the grocery store, the used car lot, the elevator at the mall are all new and filled with possibility. And children are able to dwell in the possibility of the moment so freely and completely, no doubt owing to the novelty of the world when potential frog princes still sat on lily pads. As an adult, one’s mind might not conjure the possibility of shape shifting royalty when passing by a pond of lily pads, but one would surely experience a captivating moment of wow when seeing artist Bruce Munro’s floating iridescent Lily Pads, constructed from 65,000 discarded compact discs.
Inevitably, what was unfamiliar and brimming with imaginative potential becomes pedestrian and mundane in adulthood, and living in the moment and deeply experiencing one’s surroundings is easily buried beneath schedules and grocery lists. This misfortune is what makes the installation so crucial to our modern lifestyle. The installation experience lifts our awareness out of the mundane and thrusts us into a unique landscape that for a period, suspends our spirits in a beautiful type of adult childhood.
