Client: Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis

Overview

Green Air is the second installation of a play in two acts at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis. Green Air is a sculptural aerial garden that creates a dialogue in form, material, time, and space with the previous intervention, Green Varnish.
Green Air is a space in and of itself, a systematic yet delicate arrangement of Tillandsias, hanging from thousands of slices of repurposed wood, suspended from the courtyard’s steel canopy, moving as a supraorganism.

Goals

Conceived as a living, kinetic sculpture nested within the courtyard of the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, Green Air proposes an immersive space, a hanging garden that floats above a tapestry of ever changing shadows.The installation has a powerful transformational impact on the courtyard at the heart of the Museum, as the sculpture hangs above the heads of visitors, swaying organically in the breeze, and sketching linear shadows on the courtyard’s ground plane.

Process

Green Air is the second act of a broad exploration that started in 2015 with Green Varnish, a monumental green fabric composed of thousands of succulent plants that symbolically covered all the inconvenient facts of our lifestyle. The installation was carefully deconstructed and its components were reutilized to build Green Air, creating a continuity and dialogue between the two pieces and the people who experience them.

For the second act, the space was modeled as the inverse of Green Varnish, both in form and intention. What was a solid piece anchored to the ground plane, is now a dispersed fluid volume suspended from an elevated plane. What was hidden is now exposed, hovering overhead, inviting us to urgently reflect upon the contrast between the dynamic and static in natural and man-made systems.