Outlooks: Luke Stettner
May 16 – November 29, 2015
Spanning from Storm King’s South Fields to the second floor of the Museum Building, Outlooks: Luke Stettner presents a new site-specific commission entitled a,b,moon,d. Prior to creating the work’s outdoor component—a series of sculptural trenches arranged over an eighty-foot-square expanse—Stettner studied photographs of archaeological digs and aerial diagrams of ancient architectural complexes, and observed how their geometric forms recall pictographic languages and codes. (The title a,b,moon,d extends this interest in writing and glyphs, inspired by a small child’s confusion of the letter “C” with a crescent moon.) Taken by the many fallen trees he came across while walking Storm King’s grounds, Stettner filled his trenches with biochar, a soil-enhancing, wood-based charcoal that he produced, in a carbon-negative manner called pyrolysis, in collaboration with a small farm in Vermont. Through this sculptural use of one of the earliest, most rudimentary drawing materials, Stettner blurs the line between installation and drawing.