Paula Hayes | Excerpts from the Story of Planet Thear

In her first exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, in cooperation with Salon 94 and R 20^th Century, sculptor and landscape designer Paula Hayes will present new works for the gallery’s rooftop and project space.  The rooftop installation, Marianne Boesky Gallery’s first, will be a garden which includes Hayes’ silicone vessels and soft planters of various shapes and sizes set amidst a landscape of drifts and mounds. The installation is composed of industrial and agricultural materials as well as a carefully composed planted environment.  The malleable silicone pots, with their surreal foot-like shapes, in fact expand to accommodate root growth, their forms flowing to function. Her new soft planters and a large scale Garden Necklace both exhibited for the first time, are made from roof membrane material painted with reflective paint.  The installation will also include Hayes’ sculptural aluminum bird nest trees and an ethereal bird bath cast in acrylic. 

 

In the project space will be an assemblage of Hayes’ delicate hand-blown glass terrariums, the vessels ranging from tabletop sizes to new giant proportions close to five feet tall.  Each presents a carefully constructed landscape in microcosmic view enclosed in the amorphous glass.  These portable gardens necessitate human attention and interaction, integral to the survival of their interior gardens.  Hayes has also created new crystal terrariums which explore the physical and metaphysical properties of the crystals they encase.  These works are connected to lunar charts, being ‘planted’ during full and new moons and are meant to receive periodic sun and moon baths in order to remain linked to the cyclical lunar phases.  For these terrariums, Hayes has added a double layer of glass to the orb’s surface, which acts as a magnifier of light and visual enhancement of the crystals within.  There will be a looping 5 minute animated film as well in the project space, created in collaboration with Teo Camporeale.  The film serves as a dynamic poem, illuminating the concepts that Paula Hayes employs in her artistic practice and sheltered spaces.

 

Paula Hayes lives and works in New York.  She received an MFA from Parsons School of Design, NY and has had solo exhibitions at Salon 94, New York; Galerie für Landschaftkunst, Hamburg; and Eigen + Art, Berlin.  She will have a solo show at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in 2010.