Thursday Salute to Originals: Anti-Gravity Land Art
If we throw a ball into the air, it must come down. It is unfathomable that the ball might simply float away or continue shooting upward instead. Thanks to the laws of motion and gravity, we know that what goes up must inevitably come down. But now we ask you to forget everything you learned in your highschool science courses about Isaac Newton and his laws of gravity… just for a moment. Why? Cornelia Konrads, a German artist, creates unbelievable gravity-defying installations that challenge our natural perception of time and movement.
Konrads calls her sculptures “Piles,” where she stacks items like stones, sticks, and leaves to create a weightless and suspended appearance, as if the objects are frozen in time. The Piles combines different forming principles, including calm and motion, and dissolution and density. The scenes seem to disapparate right before your eyes, yet they remain, overcoming the obstacles of gravity. Her various suspended objects are supported most often with different types of wire. Konrads works to use her land sites as textures rather than backgrounds, therefore creating both temporary and permanent art.
Konrads works often beg the questions: Are the objects rising or falling? The artist’s website states that ambivalence is prevalent in her work and is her signature. Her art “consistently irritates and destabilizes a monocausal view of the world and thus calls into question the foundations of Aristotelian logic. The laws of identity (a = a) and contradiction (a = non-a) and the excluded middle (tertium non datur) do not prevail here.”
This Thursday we salute Cornelia Konrads for her mind-bending land installations. Her work displays the interaction between what is natural and what is man-made, establishing a complex relationship with gravity that even Newton would contemplate.
Sources: Cornelia Konrads, This Is Colossal, Inhabitat, IFW Artists Blog