Site Specifics

This exhibition considers four objects and related sketches made from or for specific sites or conditions: three on land and one in the air. In diverse ways, they are intimately linked to nature and natural elements: earth, wind, sun, gravity. Three of the works relate closely to sites in Kansas, while the fourth was made in New York City, from local tree roots.

All the works are large in size and concept and exacting in their specificity. Three of the four were made between 1969 and 1972, amidst campus unrest in the United States and Europe, the development of the Land Art movement and Earth Day, and the famous rock music festival Woodstock in 1969. More than two decades later, Scott D. Jost's monumental Book of Nine Februarys poetically documented soil erosion in Kansas.

From Dale Eldred's 40-ton steel sculpture that seems to defy gravity even as it tracks the sun's movements each day, to Tal Streeter's delicately engineered kite, which he calls a "flying painting," these works probe deeply into the sublime specifics of place and precise sites (or wind conditions). They explore the limits and imaginative possibilities of what came to be called site-specific sculpture in the 1970s.