RA Walden’s site-specific installation extends across several acres of Storm King’s South Ponds for the tenth edition of Storm King’s Outlooks program, which offers emerging and mid-career artists the opportunity to present a temporary large-scale outdoor project in the landscape. In 2019, Walden was an artist-in-residence at Shandaken: Storm King where they began to think about the Art Center for a site-specific artwork.

Titled access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing), the project will depict the electron configurations of the six most common elements on earth: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur (CHNOPS). The configurations of these elements—thought to be necessary for life on any planet—will evoke the form of crop circles, here constructed from rings of perforated aluminum and laid across a grassy hillside. Considering landscape as body and body as landscape, Walden explores illness as a kind of visitation that leaves traces that are not always visible. Tapping into themes of science fiction and speculative fiction, the artist draws parallels between the phenomenon of crop circles, often considered to be hoaxes, and the experiences and access needs of disabled people, which are often met with disbelief, if not disdain, from the medical establishment and society.

When? Where?
20 May - 13 November 2023
Storm King Art Center
1 Museum Rd
New Windsor, NY 12553

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