Even before something like the Brooklyn Strand gets put into action, a unique greenery installation is coming to downtown Brooklyn: a miniature redwood forest. At 1:100 scale, the Brooklyn artist Spencer Finch will install a living, micro forest representing 790 acres of the Redwood National Park in California at MetroTech from October 1st this fall to May 13, 2018. Trees that in real life range from 98 to 380 feet will be 1 to 4 feet, and supported by a special irrigation system made for the urban landscape.
The exhibit, Spencer Finch: Lost Man’s Creek, is a partnership between the Public Art Fund, whose recent notable installations include Van Gogh’s Ear, the sideways swimming pool at Rockefeller Center and developer Forest City Ratner Companies. Save the Redwoods Leagues provided to critical data to Finch for the construction of the model, including details like “topographical and canopy height maps of a select section of the protected, inaccessible forest,” writes Public Art Fund in a press release.
This will be the longest Public Art Fund installation to date. You may also remember the work of Spencer Finch along the High Line, with the work The River that Flows Both Ways, a series of 700 panes of colored glass in the Chelsea Market passage. The panes of glass represented colors captured along the Hudson River over 700 minutes in a single day. The River that Flows Both Ways came down this year, making it the High Line’s longest art installation.
Public Art Fund’s associate curator Emma Enderby, who is organizing Spencer Finch: Lost Man’s Creek, The Public Art Fund writes that Finch has both a “scientific approach to gathering data—including precise measurements and record keeping—and a poetic sensibility,” and “In a world where climate change is at the core of societal debates, Finch’s installation in the heart of one of the most urbanized neighborhoods of the city presents us with the universal reality of nature’s power to awe and inspire, and the importance to remember and protect such wonders.”
Rapidly developing Downtown Brooklyn desperately needs some green to counteract the tall, residential skyscrapers going up and in the works, including one of the city’s tallest, 9 Dekalb, designed by SHoP architects. We’re looking forward to this installation in the fall.
Next, check out 11 art installations not to miss this August in NYC.