As summer heats up, visitors to Washington, DC. can cool off with Georgia June Goldberg’s EMERGENCE. Created specifically for the American University Museum, EMERGENCE is the single largest installation ever in the museum’s sculpture garden. It consists of white, wooden rhomboid boxes sheathed in ice-blue Olyset® netting.
The 44 irregular, shard-like boxes replicate a glacier as they rotate and reach up toward Ward Circle, a visual reminder during the heat of summer (the exhibition closes in early August) of the most pressing evidence of global warming: glacial melting.
“I am undertaking this project because of my personal love for nature, and my belief that art plays a powerful role in making us aware of the unseen”, said Goldberg, a San Francisco-based artist. I hope to poignantly call attention to the forces and fragile beauty of our environment, and the necessity of preserving it, here by showing the motion, force, and fragile beauty of fracturing glacial ice. The Olyset blue mosquito netting is perfect in many ways: ice blue and resilient, yet delicate- what the work is about. The use of the mosquito netting adds symbolic and social meaning and value to EMERGENCE, whose concepts revolve around global warming and other natural phenomenon.”
The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. For more information, call 202-885-ARTS (2787).
