Stacy Levy at the Institute of Contemporary Art

Two recent installations by Stacy Levy paraphrase the language of nature by presenting visual analogs for things unseeable and things often overlooked. Both pieces engage and instruct by affirming and celebrating the ubiquitous presence of nature as it exists even in the heart of major metropolitan areas. Where is the Moon? literally tracks the moon's movement, 24-hours-a-day, onto the walls, floor, and ceiling of the gallery; Urban Oldfield: Diagram of a Vacant Lot, the more expansive of the two works, translates typical growth patterns of urban foliage into a codified structure that allows viewers to imagine how the ICA's site might look if the building had never been built and the land had remained just another vacant lot.

These pieces are logical extensions of Levy's previous work which has long been informed by her interest in both art and science. By overtly using natural phenomena as foundational material, Levy's work joins a dialogue initiated by the earthwork artists of the '60s and '70s, and later modulated by artists such as Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, and Alan Sonfist who began to look more at the environment's infrastructure rather than seeing nature as merely another formal artmaking element.

Urban Oldfield activates the senses: As patrons enter the well-lit gallery space from the commotion of the outside world, they are confronted by the cawing of crows, the melodies of songbirds, the buzz of an occasional overhead airplane, and the distant hum of passing cars and trucks. These recorded sounds serve as a bridge from the auditory chaos of the street — complete with sirens, jackhammers, and horns — to a sanctuary of calm where human noise is subdued and the often undetected sounds of urban nature are allowed to swell and predominate. The aural aspect of this work is extremely important for it gently eases the viewer into a more contemplative perceptual mode while it conceptually mediates the incongruity of the austere architectural interior and the raw, unrefined frontier of the imaginary urban lot.

The work includes over 1,200 metal rods capped with various materials including leather, paper, plastic, and rubber which simulate a dozen different plant species. The rods range in height from approximately 6 to 48 inches and "grow" from a bed of particle board that completely covers the gallery's floor. The pseudo-vegetation is quite dense forcing gallery visitors to navigate the space via a five-foot-wide pathway that winds through the lot.

While Levy's surrogates occasionally have a vague resemblance to the plants they depict, their goal is not verisimilitude. In fact, Levy has substituted rods crowned with six-inch blue plastic discs to represent the flat clusters of small white flowers which normally characterize Queen Ann's Lace. Similarly, chicory's usual blue flower is represented by rods covered with red plastic caps making plant recognition impossible without an identification key provided by gallery attendants.

Urban Oldfield is visually exuberant but subtle patterns do emerge from the cacophony: Plants of the same species tend to grow together in irregular, roughly defined patches; smart weed is the least perpendicular, most randomly growing species — more like star bursts than plants searching for the sun; mugwort is uniform and regular, suggesting order and rigidity; rods topped with blue plastic netting representing sow thistle predominate the lot, punctuated by several major groupings of the aforementioned chicory; small outcroppings of short rods wrapped in copper wire simulating pineapple weed function like hidden treasures scattered throughout the site. While the work is infinitely entertaining on this purely formal level, it is more piquant on an intellectual plane as it reminds us of human-created impediments to the environment and, in turn, of nature's adaptive and regenerative capacity.

Levy's second piece, Where is the Moon?, features a laser beam, guided by a lunar tracking motor and equatorial mount, atop a 25-foot derrick-like structure in the center of a darkened gallery. The light beam was pointed toward the floor when I visited the gallery; that, according to the legend on the gallery wall, meant the moon was on the other side of the earth at the time. The contraption was reminiscent of an extremely tall and slow-moving version of the camera controlling apparatus in Michael Snow's 1971 classic of structural filmmaking, La Region Centrale. But rather than capturing light as did Snow's machine, Levy's apparatus is projecting light; rather than Snow's random movements, Levy describes a movement that has repeated for millions of years.

The juxtaposition of these two works creates a nice balance: the familiar, mundane, and largely ignored plight of what we generally disregard as unwanted weeds contrasted with the mystery and splendor of the methodically moving cosmos. Despite the quasi-scientific foundation of the pieces, they function as exquisite poetry that situates the often-inflated human consciousness in a much broader, accurate, and humbling context.

Ms. Levy can be contacted at stacylevy@earthlink.net

This article originally appeared in Art Papers Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 5, September/October, 1998, pp. 52-3.
© 1998 - 2001 by Dan R. Talley. All rights reserved.