Underpass, 1999
Installed at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris. Form references a cloverleaf highway interchange.
Installed at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris. Form references a cloverleaf highway interchange.
Hovering overhead, across the expansive span of the Philip Morris Sculplure Court, are the flowing curves and forceful lines of Lee Boroson's luminous fabric sculpture, Underpass. The piece, despite its immense size, appears surprisingly airy and light, as its overlapping horizontal planes of blue and white counter the towering verticality of the 42-foot-high surrounding walls. Created from a 1ranslucent, silky material generally used to make parachutes, the sculpture takes advantage of the large glass windows on all sides and diffuses light in dramatic ways. How, and to what extent, the piece refracls the artificial and natural light depends on the time of day and on shifts in the weather. By temporarily changing the configurations of the archi1ecture and reflecting color and light, Underpass transforms the atmosphere of this unusual atrium-like setting and alters our physical perceptions of being in, and moving through, the Sculpture Court. Gazing upward at Underpass, you might imagine that the outdoors has moved in and 1ha1 you stand beneath a sky or a running river. The work's organic feel is enhanced by air currents, originating from a fan embedded in the building's crawlspace, which pulse through the piece, causing it to billow and sway, as if it were a living, breathing creature. As the tide suggests, however, the sculpture's form relates to more than natural phenomena. The structure is also associated with highway design, specifically a cloverleaf traffic exchange pattern. In this type of road system (and i.a the sculpture itself), four individual circles loop around a central straight thrust, creating a linear scheme that resembles a four-leaf clover.
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