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October 28 2011 test. -
Michael Jones McKean, conceptual sketch (2009) -
The Rainbow installation. Photo: Larry Gawel. -
August 15 2010 test. Photo: Chris Machian | minorwhite studios.
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts is pleased to present Michael Jones McKean's The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms. The project creates a simple, but phenomenal visual event — a rainbow in the sky. The public artwork will produce temporary rainbows above the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska using the most elemental materials: sunlight and rainwater. Throughout the summer, at scheduled times a rainbow will appear above Bemis Center's downtown building.
This commissioned artwork and exhibition represents extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. Irrigation and rainwater harvesting experts from Omaha-based Lindsay Corporation and Watertronics, structural and mechanical engineers, atmospheric scientists, plumbing and electrical experts and Bemis Center staff have joined artist Michael Jones McKean in creating a wholly integrated system for this site-specific, temporary work.
McKean is a former artist-in-residence of the Bemis Center and current professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2002, he has conducted ongoing experiments leading to the production of this work. McKean's work will amplify the placeless, celebratory, seductive and elusive qualities of the spectacular event of a rainbow.
The artwork will solely utilize captured rainwater and will be powered with renewable sources. Leading up to the exhibition, extensive modifications to the Bemis Center's five-story, repurposed industrial warehouse took place — creating a completely self-contained water harvesting and large-scale storage system. Throughout the project cycle, collected and recaptured stormwater will be filtered and stored in six above-ground, 10,500 gallon water tanks. Within the gallery, a custom designed 60-horsepower pump supplies pressurized water to nine nozzles mounted to the 20,000 square foot roof of the Bemis Center. At timed intervals, in the morning and early evening, a dense water-wall will be projected above the building in which a rainbow will emerge. Based on atmospheric conditions, vantage point, available sunlight and the changing angle of the sun in the sky, each rainbow will have a singular character and quality. Depending on the position of the sun, one could see the rainbow from a thousand feet away or seemingly touch it with your hand.
Whether a majestic arch in the sky that appears after a short spring shower or a small, homespun rainbow created with a garden hose on a sunny day, a rainbow operates as an egalitarian visual experience. It is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. The Rainbow exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice.
McKean is deeply interested in the rainbow as a complex form — ephemeral and steeped in mythology — that possesses an out-of-time existence as pure optical phenomena. The image of a rainbow extends through time, surpassing our known and archived histories, and operates as a constant unchanged form. Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like and meaningful. Whether perceived immediately as an artwork or not, the experience holds the power to connect diverse publics through an intangible, shared encounter.
Extending McKean's interest in objects and time scales, within Bemis Center's exhibition space he has grouped artifacts and sculpturest that suggest specific histories, poetics and values. Among these objects are a 110 pound 5,000-year-old Campo de Cielo meteorite, a shell recovered from the deep Pacific Ocean, a Bristlecone pine tree (the oldest living thing on the planet, containing DNA sequencing to outlast all living things) and an American quilt completed in 1880. These objects are paired with a simple glass prism and light source that together cast a small perpetual spectrum. Of these eclectic objects, McKean says, "In tandem with the rainbow, these objects create a single sculpture. The rainbow is a reminder of a constant universal — something forever, simultaneously contemporary and ancient, not fixed in time like the materiality of artifacts and objects, never succumbing to the persistence of time. In the face of our earthbound landscape of shapes and forms, of geologic, evolutionary, archeological times scales, the rainbow is a kind of perfection, our oldest image."
The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms is McKean's largest project to date. McKean's work connects seemingly disparate cultural histories to specific form. He constructs spaces of uncanny scale — failed epics, specific objects that serve as synecdoche for expansive narratives, or condensed moments of universal phenomena. He is known for operatic, epic sculptural installations and delicate tableaus alike. In both, he builds dense narrative spaces composed of real and represented cultural talismans that stretch to encompass the fullness of meaning and human sentiment.
Through a specific, yet eclectic use of materials and techniques — spanning ancient meteorites and vintage boom boxes, to papier-mache and auto body finishes — his work roams in the margins of theater, folklore, science, architecture, mysticism and sculpture-making itself. For McKean, the "gaps between these coordinates become poetically charged spaces, momentarily bonding disparate objects in crystalline unison. The results of this process form a psychic bridge allowing entrance to a world flickering across meaning, complexity, representation, and materiality."
The Rainbow is a work of significant logistical complexity that realizes a silent, delicate and temporary visual experience. The work provides a direct and momentous experience of art, science, ecology and wonder.
A series of weekly tours and dialogues about the project will be free and open to the public. Additionally the concepts of the work will be explored in a series of focused panel discussions and events planned in conjunction with the project.
The Bemis Center will publish an exhibition and project catalogue, including essays that further illuminate these ideas.
The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.
This commissioned artwork and exhibition represents extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. Irrigation and rainwater harvesting experts from Omaha-based Lindsay Corporation and Watertronics, structural and mechanical engineers, atmospheric scientists, plumbing and electrical experts and Bemis Center staff have joined artist Michael Jones McKean in creating a wholly integrated system for this site-specific, temporary work.
McKean is a former artist-in-residence of the Bemis Center and current professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2002, he has conducted ongoing experiments leading to the production of this work. McKean's work will amplify the placeless, celebratory, seductive and elusive qualities of the spectacular event of a rainbow.
The artwork will solely utilize captured rainwater and will be powered with renewable sources. Leading up to the exhibition, extensive modifications to the Bemis Center's five-story, repurposed industrial warehouse took place — creating a completely self-contained water harvesting and large-scale storage system. Throughout the project cycle, collected and recaptured stormwater will be filtered and stored in six above-ground, 10,500 gallon water tanks. Within the gallery, a custom designed 60-horsepower pump supplies pressurized water to nine nozzles mounted to the 20,000 square foot roof of the Bemis Center. At timed intervals, in the morning and early evening, a dense water-wall will be projected above the building in which a rainbow will emerge. Based on atmospheric conditions, vantage point, available sunlight and the changing angle of the sun in the sky, each rainbow will have a singular character and quality. Depending on the position of the sun, one could see the rainbow from a thousand feet away or seemingly touch it with your hand.
Whether a majestic arch in the sky that appears after a short spring shower or a small, homespun rainbow created with a garden hose on a sunny day, a rainbow operates as an egalitarian visual experience. It is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. The Rainbow exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice.
McKean is deeply interested in the rainbow as a complex form — ephemeral and steeped in mythology — that possesses an out-of-time existence as pure optical phenomena. The image of a rainbow extends through time, surpassing our known and archived histories, and operates as a constant unchanged form. Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like and meaningful. Whether perceived immediately as an artwork or not, the experience holds the power to connect diverse publics through an intangible, shared encounter.
Extending McKean's interest in objects and time scales, within Bemis Center's exhibition space he has grouped artifacts and sculpturest that suggest specific histories, poetics and values. Among these objects are a 110 pound 5,000-year-old Campo de Cielo meteorite, a shell recovered from the deep Pacific Ocean, a Bristlecone pine tree (the oldest living thing on the planet, containing DNA sequencing to outlast all living things) and an American quilt completed in 1880. These objects are paired with a simple glass prism and light source that together cast a small perpetual spectrum. Of these eclectic objects, McKean says, "In tandem with the rainbow, these objects create a single sculpture. The rainbow is a reminder of a constant universal — something forever, simultaneously contemporary and ancient, not fixed in time like the materiality of artifacts and objects, never succumbing to the persistence of time. In the face of our earthbound landscape of shapes and forms, of geologic, evolutionary, archeological times scales, the rainbow is a kind of perfection, our oldest image."
The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms is McKean's largest project to date. McKean's work connects seemingly disparate cultural histories to specific form. He constructs spaces of uncanny scale — failed epics, specific objects that serve as synecdoche for expansive narratives, or condensed moments of universal phenomena. He is known for operatic, epic sculptural installations and delicate tableaus alike. In both, he builds dense narrative spaces composed of real and represented cultural talismans that stretch to encompass the fullness of meaning and human sentiment.
Through a specific, yet eclectic use of materials and techniques — spanning ancient meteorites and vintage boom boxes, to papier-mache and auto body finishes — his work roams in the margins of theater, folklore, science, architecture, mysticism and sculpture-making itself. For McKean, the "gaps between these coordinates become poetically charged spaces, momentarily bonding disparate objects in crystalline unison. The results of this process form a psychic bridge allowing entrance to a world flickering across meaning, complexity, representation, and materiality."
The Rainbow is a work of significant logistical complexity that realizes a silent, delicate and temporary visual experience. The work provides a direct and momentous experience of art, science, ecology and wonder.
A series of weekly tours and dialogues about the project will be free and open to the public. Additionally the concepts of the work will be explored in a series of focused panel discussions and events planned in conjunction with the project.
The Bemis Center will publish an exhibition and project catalogue, including essays that further illuminate these ideas.
The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.