the snake path

I just wrote about Robert Irwin’s ter­rific art­work in the UCSD Stu­art col­lec­tion. The col­lec­tion has another piece that I like, Alexis Smith’s Snake Path, from 1992.

From the collection’s page on the artist:

Smith’s work for the Stu­art Col­lec­tion alludes to the com­plex rela­tion­ship between nature and cul­ture or, in the con­text of the uni­ver­sity, between knowl­edge and the land­scape. Her Snake Path con­sists of a wind­ing 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide foot­path tiled in the form of a ser­pent whose head ends at the ter­race of the Cen­tral Library. The tail wraps around an exist­ing con­crete path­way as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent’s slightly rounded body passes a mon­u­men­tal gran­ite book carved with a quote from Milton’s Par­adise Lost. The snake then cir­cles around a small trop­i­cal gar­den rep­re­sent­ing Eden. These pointed allu­sions to the bib­li­cal con­flict between inno­cence and knowl­edge mark an apt sym­bolic path to the university’s main repos­i­tory of books. The con­cept of find­ing sanc­tu­ary within one­self — out­side the ide­al­is­tic and pro­tected con­fines of the uni­ver­sity — speaks directly to the stu­dent on the verge of enter­ing the “real world.”

Here’s their offi­cial overview pic­ture of the work:



And here are some snap­shots from a walk there last week, first a closeup of the hexag­o­nal slate tiles that make up the snake’s “scales”:

snakepathscales.jpg

…and here are a cou­ple shots of Eden, maybe not exactly “trop­i­cal,” as described, but a lush plant­ing that con­trasts to the sur­round­ing native veg­e­ta­tion:

snakepatheden.jpg


snakepathseat.jpg

The plants in “Eden” are plants that have bib­li­cal ref­er­ences or those that some­how look like they’d belong in an eden. In the two pic­tures above you can see how the Ital­ian cypresses have been pruned in a way that to me recalls some of the plants in the back­ground of Leonardo’s 1470s Annun­ci­a­tion, now at the Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence:

leonardo.jpg

So…you can study gar­den books on how to prune a plant–or you can study a paint­ing by Leonardo da Vinci!

March 20 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: • • • • • | 3 Comments »

coda: John Pfahl

A few posts ago I wrote about the gar­den pho­tog­ra­phy of John Pfahl. Four of the works from this series are in the exhi­bi­tion, Pic­tur­ing Eden, at San Diego’s Museum of Pho­to­graphic Arts. The show runs through Jan­u­ary 13, 2008.

The show has a lot of work in it on the gen­eral theme of par­adises, whether they be gained, lost, regained or cre­ated. The show is curated by Deb­o­rah Klochko, and had its ori­gins at George East­man House Inter­na­tional Museum of Pho­tog­ra­phy and Film. I had almost no time to look at the work, but there were def­i­nitely some great images. I’ll try to write up some­thing a lit­tle more exten­sive later…

December 01 2007 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: • • • • • | No Comments »