MARA ADAMITZ SCRUPE

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 Labor
 A Site-Specific Environmental Installation
Neuberger Museum Biennial of Public Art
June 27 - October, 1999
(click here to view installation images only)

During travels through rural New York in recent years, I’ve been fascinated by the stone walls marking older roads, farms, and fields. Their historical progression from cheap and ubiquitous fences bordering small colonial New England fields, to despised obstacles removed from larger 19th century mechanized farms, to late-twentieth-century romantic landscape feature, follows a path similar to the American experience of wild nature since European colonization. Nature as building material; nature as hindrance to progress; and nature as charming landscape feature might also describe the history of land use for the property on which Purchase College, and The Neuberger Museum, are situated.

The design for the site installation entitled LABOR was inspired by the wooded copse located on the campus of Purchase College, adjacent to the Neuberger Museum of Art. A pedestrian path passes nearby, and site features include remnants of an old stone wall, scattered large boulders, and fairly young trees. These features are situated on level ground which is readily accessible to foot traffic.

Within this site, I installed a custom-fabricated clear acrylic pedestal featuring an illuminated LED panel inscribed with the following text:    
When I initially viewed the site for the installation, it struck me as a sort of graveyard, and a memorial, to ideas about freedom, progress, and the American character. Although I had written the brief poem entitled LABOR several years ago, its suitability for both this site, and to my purposes, seems almost uncanny.

The clear acrylic podium is installed and secured to a concrete pad located at the center of the site’s circle of stones. The LED text panel contained within the weathertight case at the top of the podium displays the poem, and is illuminated 24 hours a day via a custom-designed solar power system. This system is situated in an open clearing located just in front of the installation site, and is the first installation element approached by the visitor.

While the installation LABOR is
primarily a nighttime experience, the site is dimly illuminated by day, as in a lecture hall, with the podium and text centered among the existing semicircle of stones, suggesting an outdoor amphitheater or other public gathering place.  I have chosen to work with the podium, an object which is ubiquitous on a University campus, as a means of tying the Museum’s location on the Purchase College campus, to the site and the installation.

The elements of Labor rest very lightly on the landscape,
changing it very little, but illuminating it and recontextualizing it, giving the visitor an opportunity to see it in a way which might not formerly have been possible.