MEG WEBSTER | PAULA COOPER GALLERY
May 7 - June 24, 2016
534 West 21st Street
“Minimalist inspired installation work using organic materials such as salt, twigs, moss, and live plants highlighting the natural world as ever evolving, but at risk by human activity”
Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Meg Webster. The exhibition will be on view from May 7 – June 24, 2016.
Meg Webster’s work finds inspiration in the intrinsic beauty of natural materials. Using metal, glass and organic elements like salt, soil, twigs and moss, the artist creates large-scale installations and precise structures rooted in the traditions of Land Art of the 1970s. Also highly influenced by Minimalist artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Robert Morris, Webster draws on their rigorous formal vocabulary to create simple, geometric forms that directly and perceptually engage the body and its senses.
Meg Webster, Volume for Lying Flat, 2016, peat moss, green moss, soil, 25 x 59 x 81 1/2 in. (55.9 x 149.9 x 207 cm)
In Volume for Lying Flat, Webster structures peat and green moss to create a human-sized bed. Familiar associations of pleasure, fertility and slumber, coincide with the sight and scent of fresh, damp moss. A “living” work, Volume for Lying Flat requires light, water and continual care and attention.
Meg Webster, Stick Structure, 2016, various branches, twigs, and flowering plants, approximately 72 x 192 inches in diameter (182.8 x 487.6 centimeters)
For Stick Structure, Webster’s collects branches, twigs and flowering plants that converge to form an enclosed circle. The ephemeral installation draws from various local gardens, with shrubbery gathered recently enough to bear florae of the current season. As the viewer walks through, enveloped by the scents and textures of his or her surroundings.
Meg Webster, Mother Mound Salt, 2016, salt, approximately 42 inches high x 9 1/2 feet in diameter (106.6 x 289.5 cm)
Nine thousand pounds of coarse salt form a smooth 5-foot swell entitled Mother Mound Salt. A monument to the earth and its bounty, the work evokes the curve of the earth or the tumescent bend of a pregnant belly. Its primal form and grand scale belie its delicate materiality of millions of individual crystals.
Meg Webster, Solar Grow Room, 2016, 4 raised wooden planters with grass, flowers and other vegetation, off-grid solar powered electrical system, grow lights, mylar covered walls, each planter: 42 x 50 x 50 inches (106.8 x 127 x 127 cm) in room 13'10" x 21' 6" x 21' 6"
First created for Webster’s recent show at Villa Panza, “Natura Naturans,” Solar Grow Room is an ecosystem sustained by solar panels on the gallery exterior. Bathed in pink light, raised planters are cultivated with moss, grass, flowers and other vegetation. A lifelong environmentalist, Webster draws awareness to nature as an ever-evolving force, as well as mankind’s careless destruction of the earth’s resources and energies.
Meg Webster was born in San Francisco in 1944. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1983. Webster’s work has been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. Most recently, Webster participated in the two-person exhibition, “Natura Naturans” at Villa Panza in Varese Italy. She will present her large-scale earthwork, Concave Room for Bees, at Socrates Sculpture Park, commissioned for their May 2016 exhibition, “LANDMARK.”
Webster lives and works in New York.
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