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July 12, 2005
Ken Smith at Cornerstone
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Found! in California's Sonoma Valley, a landscape installation by one of New York's most inventive and playful landscape architects. Ken Smith is one of an expanding group of landscape designers whose work is featured at "Cornerstone: festival of gardens" located about 3 miles south of Sonoma. The complex includes a cafe, a nursery and a garden artifacts shop, but the real purpose is exhibiting the work of forward thinking Landscape Architects and garden designers. The brochure explains that the gardens - 27 of them at this point - "have been envisioned as an inspiration and resource for everyone interested in gardens". The work here is about as far as you can get from the cozy "garden room" or the modernist city plaza that we usually associate with the discipline of garden design.
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Many of the designers are from the West Coast; Topher Delaney, Pamela Burton and Ancy Cao come to mind. But there are international stars like Martha Schwartz whose hilarious installation called Usual Suspects spoofs the work of the greats of landscape architecture, including her own.
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One of the most visually striking pieces is by Claude Cormier of Montreal. He has covered a dying tree with thousands of aqua colored Christmas tree balls. The resulting sculpture is both arresting and though provoking. Much of the work is serious and beautiful as in Pamela Burton's meditation on soil and earth called Earth Walk. Into this mix comes Ken Smith's Daisy Border, a series of plastic pinwheel daisies set in a green grid. It's incongruous in the middle of the dry California landscape but also funny. Smith, whose sometimes whimsical work grows out of a deep knowledge and love of historical landscape, often focuses on the distinction between artificial, metaphorical and real. His work varies from the clean modernist Lever Brothers Plaza in Manhattan to a schoolyard at PS 19 in Queens where he created a woodland educational garden and a play area with mini dumpsters used as planters. Smith proposed a similar grid of daisy pinwheels for a garden commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the Museum Tower. The daisy idea was shot down and replaced by an equally artificial but slightly more traditional design. It’s great to see them growing so well in California.
Link: Cornerstone
Posted by gardenguidenyc at July 12, 2005 03:35 PM