OccupyING The Present: An Exhibition of Temporary and Time-Based Art
This summer at HarborArts, fifteen Boston-area sculptors explore our “occupancy of the
present” with new site-responsive artworks amid the sights of a busy marina and working
waterfront. Nature, history, and the geography of Boston Harbor have all inspired and
informed the art. Each work of art redeploys and transforms observed characteristics and
found materials of the waterfront to make the familiar strange, and the strange, familiar.
The challenge of temporary site-responsive art is to invent and improvise in an extended
moment. Working together as a group, the curator and the artists have developed a
conversation around the waterfront, the East Boston community, and each other’s unique
artistic visions. We hope our visitors will join us in the dialogue, participate in the
interactive art, and share ideas with us through our website, occupyingthepresent.org.
All the new works in the public areas of the shipyard are marked by a blue-and-orange
tripod holding artists’descriptions. Among the diverse strategies you will find common
time-related threads. For many artists it is the urgency of environmental threats to human
survival and a wish to generate creative action toward the problems of climate change,
rising sea levels, and increasing ocean pollution. Others celebrate the natural and human
rhythms still present in an urban and industrialized setting: the regularity of the tides, the
play of sunlight on water, sound patterns caught in the din of the working shipyard. The
playful titles of the pieces give further context to the artists’ ideas, joining up the inner
purposes of their art with outer meaning lifted from the surroundings.
Like a community of immigrants, each work speaks a different language---from
traditional stone carving to contemporary assemblage, audio-installation, and internet
communications. These deliberate forms also bring to awareness a feast of inadvertent
and ephemeral images grounded in the activities of a port. Igniting passion, poetry, and
simple awareness, the art transports us back into the present moment, which is where we
live.
Elizabeth Michelman, Curator
OccupyING The Present, June, 2013