ART STOP 5
Micah Lexier
The Trees, 2017
312 cast aluminum tiles, bronze-coated with a patina finish
Location: Brookfield Place Calgary, James K. Gray Galleria
Micah Lexier was born 1960 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is a Canadian artist and curator. He was educated at the University of Manitoba (BFA, 1982) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (MFA, 1984). He lives and works in Toronto.
The Trees is a composition of abstract shapes created in response to the scale and play of light and shadow in Brookfield Place’s dynamic James K. Gray Galleria. When seen from afar, the artwork appears as a minimal graphic drawing, but as one approaches, intricate textures and repeating patterns are revealed. Within each hand-finished, square metal tile is a complex three-dimensional surface that transforms with the environmental ebbs and flows of the day.
This artwork is a companion to The Forest and The Trees, Lexier’s sculpture located in the 6th Avenue lobby. The source imagery for both artworks is a series of simple line drawings and numbers found in a book of cross-stitch patterns. The shapes that comprise The Trees can be read as sixteen individual forms, as a detail of one of the tiles found in the companion sculpture, or as a close-up view of a tree’s bark.
The Trees balances between the natural and manufactured worlds, creating an opportunity to perceive and appreciate Calgary’s abundant and ever-changing natural light.
Micah Lexier’s work figures in numerous museum collections around the world, including: the Art Gallery of Ontario; Musée d’art de Joliette; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; the British Museum, London, England; Glenbow Museum; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Australia; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, to name a few. He has also completed numerous large-scale public art commissions at: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (1999); Scurfield Hall, University of Calgary, Alberta (1994); and the Air Canada Centre, Toronto (1999), to name a few.
Micah Lexier
The Forest and the Trees, 2017
1,225 cast aluminum tiles, bronze-coated with a patina finish
8.4-by-8.4 metres; each individual tile is 24 centimetres square.
Location: Brookfield Place Calgary, 6th Avenue North Tower Lobby
Micah Lexier was born 1960 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is a Canadian artist and curator. He was educated at the University of Manitoba (BFA, 1982) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (MFA, 1984). He lives and works in Toronto.
The Forest and The Trees is a high mark in artist Micah Lexier’s long career. This majestic metal tapestry dominates the wide-open north tower lobby of Brookfield Place in downtown Calgary. The artwork is a grid of 1,225 hand-finished metal tiles, 35 tiles wide by 35 tiles high. Each tile is 24 centimetres square, detailed with raised linear segments interspersed with numbers. As winter light transits across the surface, rich metallic hues gleam.
Lexier began this project with a mid-century pattern book of floral designs for cross stitch, a humble graphic beginning that presented itself as an elaborate puzzle as the artwork was developed. He organized 269 initial squares into a design of 1,225 tiles by reorienting and duplicating. Each graphic design was reformatted with a 3-D printer into a low-relief sculptural tile, cast in aluminum and coated with bronze.
“I love it when an artwork is so much more than you imagined it would be,” Lexier said in describing his process. “I could not have anticipated that the bronze would be so responsive to the light in the building, but this, in the end, has become the defining quality of the artwork for me.”
Micah Lexier’s work figures in numerous museum collections around the world, including: the Art Gallery of Ontario; Musée d’art de Joliette; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; the British Museum, London, England; Glenbow Museum; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Australia; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, to name a few. He has also completed numerous public art commissions at: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (1999); Scurfield Hall, University of Calgary, Alberta (1994); and the Air Canada Centre, Toronto (1999), to name a few.
Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp
Herald/Harbinger
Mixed media, sound installation
Location: Brookfield Place Calgary
Ben Rubin was born in 1964 and earned his degrees from Brown University and MIT Media Labs. He lives and works in New York, and is currently director of the Center for Data Arts at The New School in New York City.
Jer Thorp was born in 1975 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and trained as a geneticist. He lives and works in New York, and now serves as Innovator-In-Residence at the U.S. Library of Congress.
Heralding the dawn of Earth’s Anthropocene period, this artwork incorporates a collection of data feeds to illustrate the interrelationship between human activity in Calgary and the natural system of the Bow Glacier in the Canadian Rockies, which exists in a perpetual state of physical transformation.
Inside the lobby, the glacier’s real-time perturbations are visually juxtaposed against the aggregated trajectories of nearby pedestrians and vehicles in a sequence of overlapping visualizations, while outside on the plaza the glacier’s ceaseless activity is made visible and audible, creating a visceral public presence for this restless complex of ice, rock, and water.
Other Projects of Note:
Jer Thorp, Jake Barton and Local Projeccts designed an algorithm and an accompanying software tool to aid in the placement of the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan (2009), among other projects.
Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen designed a permanent installation tilted Moveable Type in the lobby in the New York Times building (2007).