LSC celebrates launch of Big Art initiative
On April 1, 2023, Liberty Science Center celebrated the launch of our Big Art initiative with the debut of two incredible installations at a special evening event.
Marking LSC’s 30th anniversary, these two installations – The Building, 2023 and The Politics of Eternity – see one of the Science Center’s most conceptually ambitious programming expansions yet, with an arts program that aims to broaden the scope of what science centers offer to the public.
“Science, too often, is presented as a series of results, as opposed to the long, torturous process of someone toiling away in a lab for days, months, years on end to prove an educated hunch they had,” said LSC President and CEO Paul Hoffman.
“Such processes are more often associated with art, which, in turn, is rarely acknowledged to pose questions the way science does. There’s a binary drawn between the two — they’re understood to exist on polar ends of the spectrum of how humans relate to the world, while in truth they have a lot more in common.
“By bringing Big Art to the Center, we hope to break down this boundary and further our pursuit of inspiring the next generation of innovators by emphasizing imagination and inspiration.”
The Building, 2023 was created by world-renowned Argentine conceptual artist Leandro Erlich, bringing his acclaimed Bâtiment series to the New York area for the first time (previous locations include Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Donetsk, and the Echigo-Tsumari region of Japan).
Challenging the laws of gravity, the artist places a model of a building on the ground, allowing “spect-actors,” as he refers to them, to interact with the model, draping themselves across walls and pretending to hang off a balcony. A giant mirror, standing over the model at an angle, creates the illusion of the scene’s veracity.
Each piece in Erlich’s Bâtiment series is a representational composite of the architectural vernacular belonging to the location in which it is installed. As a result, LSC houses a New York City brick storefront — complete with a deli and fire-escapes — which greets visitors in the entrance hall of LSC.
The Politics of Eternity is a seven-piece sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin. It represents the idea of the future mirroring the past, with each element of an imagined future having a complement in the past. Where there's a cluster of satellites by the moon in the future, for example, there's a cluster of dinosaurs by the sun in the past.
To create the intricate sculpture, Yellin embedded 34 layers of glass with paint and thousands of images cut from magazines and books. He stacked these into seven “window sandwiches” that collectively weigh 10,000 pounds. Constructed with the meticulous intricacy characteristic of Yellin’s practice, the piece took 20,000 hours to complete.
Check out The Building, 2023 and The Politics of Eternity on your next visit to LSC!
