Ocean tides are critical to the function of East Boston’s harbor. The activities of commercial and pleasure crafts, cargo boats, boat tours and sailing vessels, all take place on the tidal waters whose ebb and flow are ruled by the moon’s gravitational pulls. ‘Tide Tables’ documents numerically and color-codes the daily times of the high and low tides on each of the months/days of the duration of the exhibit.

The sculpture plays with numbers to draw attention to the interrelationship of the moon's gravitational pull, the water, and the hours and minutes of the day and night. It shows that our environment is part of the wider universe and that we are all governed by natural forces not under our control, which we must respect.  Schoolchildren learn that tables, like the multiplication tables, communicate numerical information. The sculpture ‘Tide Tables’ makes real tables the physical site for such information. As each high and low tide passes, we sense its ephemerality; the tide turns and its changes are marked four times each day.  The entire sculpture is a colorful meditation on the movement of water marked by time.  

The tables themselves, recycled and restored, will be donated following the exhibition to neighborhood individuals or organizations first-come-first serve as mementos of the exhibition.

Karen Klein - Tide Tables

Recycled wooden tables and marine chart table on site

Karen Klein is a dancer, visual artist, and poet. As a young woman, she studied dance with Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Mary Anthony.  Retiring after thirty-seven years in the Brandeis English Department, she resumed dance studies and has performed with the Prometheus Dance Elders Ensemble, and in work by Peter DiMuro, Kelley Donovan, Daniel McCusker, Joan Green, Emily Beattie, and Kee Chin. Her sculptures and artist books have been widely shown in solo, two-person, and group exhibitions; her drawings have been published in books from Oxford, Beacon, SUNY, University of Oklahoma, Davis, and Holly House Presses and magazines in the US and Canada.

She is a member of Galatea Fine Art Gallery, New England Sculptors Association, and Studios Without Walls.  Her most recent publication of poetry was in The Drunken Boat (2012).

www.nesculptors.com, www.galateafineart.com