I’ll let you in on a well-guarded secret (and don’t you ever tell.) I read New York Magazine’s Madame Clairvoyant’s Horoscopes on occasion, not for the prediction (I don’t believe in astrology, case closed) but for her ingenious ways of formulating things vaguely and psychological astute enough that they can be a projection screen for whatever is likely going on in anyone’s life. Below is last week’s example.

Lately, it feels hard to carve out the space you need for yourself. Everyone else asks for so much care and attention from you that by the end of the day, it feels like there’s no time left for yourself, no energy left for dreaming. So this week, reserve some time — even if it’s only a few minutes — to be alone, free from anyone else’s wants, free from being seen at all. There’s a wonderful, vital luxury in these temporary moments of escape. You can rediscover your own inner landscape and the secret beauty it holds.

Who couldn’t relate?? Who wouldn’t agree? It felt particularly fitting since “space” is the blog topic of the week. However, upon inspection my inner landscape did not reveal some secret beauty. It did offer a sacrilegious thought, though, that the work that I am introducing today, is comparable to horoscopes. Create something sufficiently malleable and supersede it with a disambiguating interpretation or label, and before you know it everyone discovers the applied parallels.

Janet Echelman works with nets and light, created on a LARGE scale, originally described as capturing a sense of place, or site-specific history. They are eye candy. Which is not to say that they don’t impress some with the considerations, craft and technology that goes into producing them. Their story of origin is almost too perfect. Young artist sent to tropical climes to teach painting to the locals, tools and materials never arrive; walk on the beach exposes fishermen drying their nets in the winds, sculptural configurations that lead to stand-in use of nets as medium, in ever larger dimensions and sophistication. No longer young artist is now teaching at Ivy Leage institutions and in incredible international demand, both for temporary exhibitions and permanent installations.

Critics that used to hedge their bets, (“giving crafts a coolly conceptual edge,” NYT in 2015) are now glowing, just like the installations they revere. A meteoric career.

My horoscope analogy of multi-layered interpretation was originally triggered by a work close to home, an installation at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Titled Impatient Optimist (perhaps in anticipation of the legal approach of divorce lawyers) the sculpture is meant to express the spirit of the Foundation’s work and mission.

The shape of the sculpture is derived from color data of the Seattle sky, photographed evers 5 minuted across a 24 hour interval, analyzed and graphed radially to generate the form. At night, lighting is added that echoes, in real time, the sun rises of the foundation’s office locations around the globe. “This connects the work happening in the campus to the tangible services being delivered to people around the world.…The sculpture net is a physical manifestation of connectedness. The number of knots alludes to the notion that the work of a single person can affect a million lives. When a single element of the sculpture moves, every other element is affected.” (Ref.)

Note, there is a lot of thought and specific detail going into the creation. For the uninformed viewer, though, so many alternative interpretations are possible. Glass bowl came to mind for this one, given Seattle’s famous glass blowing studios, or drag net, given the Pacific Fishing Industries base in Seattle, or – well, you can probably come up with some additional interpretations without much effort.

The same struck me to be likely for an installation in Greensboro, North Carolina, titled “Where We Met”. Made up of over 35 miles of technical twine woven into 242,800 knots, the sculpture was inspired by Greensboro’s history as a railroad and textile hub. “When I was asked to give visual form to the history of Greensboro and the textile tradition of North Carolina, I began with research,” explains Janet Echelman. “I discovered that Greensboro was nicknamed the “Gateway City” because six railroad lines intersected there, and I started tracing the railway lines and marking the historic textile mills that dotted the routes.

Railroad convergence? Tulips? Brightly colored tissue wrappings of a birthday gift? Does it actually matter? Don’t we always imbue a piece of art or craft with our own interpretation? As we do horoscopes? Isn’t it about the psychological kernel of truths that serve as guiding reminders for the latter, or the aesthetic experience that shapes the appreciation of the former? So why do I not take to this work? Is it a generalized aversion to size on steroids, or a reactivity to unavoidable exposure – you cannot not see them and their alteration of space. There are also environmental concerns for bird safety. Echelman claims no bird was ever caught and hurt in those nets, but that does not take into account what light pollution does, particularly for migrating species.

Some of Echelman’s works are less tied to a sense of place and more to global events, with the added bonus that it allows for the sculptures to be more applicable across the exhibition circuit in diverse locations. One of a series of sculptures corresponds to a map of the energy released across the Pacific Ocean during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, one of the most devastating natural disasters in recorded history. The event was so powerful it shifted the earth on its axis and shortened the day, March 11, 2011, by 1.8 millionths of a second, lending work below its title. The sculpture’s form was inspired by data sets of the tsunami’s wave heights rippling across the entire Pacific Ocean. “The artwork delves into content related to our complex interdependencies with larger cycles of time and our physical world.”

The photograph was taken in London; the installation was also shown in a group show some time earlier at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. SAAM’s exhibition included Jennifer Angus, Chakaia Booker, Gabriel Dawe, Tara Donovan, Patrick Dougherty, Janet Echelman, John Grade, Maya Lin, and Leo Villareal.

From the museum blurb: “They are connected by their interest in creating large-scale installations from unexpected materials. Index cards, marbles, strips of wood—all objects so commonplace and ordinary we often overlook them—were assembled, massed, and juxtaposed to utterly transform spaces and engage us in the most surprising ways. The works are expressions of process, labor, and materials that are grounded in our everyday world, but that combine to produce awe-inspiring results.” The title? Artists of Wonder.

I do wonder.

No music found for fishing nets, but two pieces about large scale water displays, Ravel inspired by Liszt.

Photographs accordingly, large scale trick fountains (also affected by wind and manipulated by lighting at night like the installations) in Longwood Gardens.