Improvisation with the Artists at Grounds For Sculpture

On Saturday, June 5, 2010 from 11 am – 4 pm, Grounds for Sculpture and MM2 Modern Dance will be kicking off the celebration of their mutual tenth anniversaries with an Anniversary Arts Party.

The annual celebration of the founding of Grounds For Sculpture, offers a host of activities and events. Meet the Artists and tour the grounds with select Artists-in-the-Park at 11am, 1pm, and 2pm. MM2 Modern Dance will be on site performing improvisational dance at select sculptures in accompaniment to the Meet the Artist Tours.

Our schedule, the artists and the sculptures that we will be creating improvisational dance around are as follows:


Tour at 11am with performance at “The Chase” by Dana Stewart

Circling a ring of lush greenery in the sculpture park are more than a dozen bronze beasts by Dana Stewart.  The individual characters are based upon the artist’s own imaginary menagerie.  Playful, whimsical and amusing at first glance, more in-depth contemplation of the fanciful creatures reveals underlying dark and somber qualities.  Grimaces, snarls, stances, and other gestures convey an array of emotions, including fear, lamentation, and aggression.  Tails, commonly recognized as an animal’s emotional barometer, are exaggerated in size in comparison to each creature’s body mass.  Long and thick, the appendages are held upright, standing erect, taut and on-guard.  The straining, extended necks and the tight lines of the textured bodies aid in relaying this tension between lighthearted whimsy and the darker range of emotions.The Chase, two long-legged creatures frozen in a head-to-tail whirlwind of frenetic movements of playful (or is it fore-playful) activity.


Tour at 1pm with performance at “The Jubilant Dancer” by Cliff Ward

Ward has combined two art forms, dance and sculpture, in his work, Jubilant Dancer.  He has long admired the talents of dancers and choreographers like Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, and George Ballanchine and their ability to create an illusion of defying gravity.  This strong interest in the lines, lightness, and grace of artistic and athletic movement has inspired Ward to produce a series of sculptures.  Each figure in the series, including Jubilant Dancer, is differentiated from the others through its actions and attire.  Ward makes many of his “dancers” through a unique process that utilizes plastic wrap and various paper products; however, Jubilant Dancer was cast in bronze from a plaster model.


Tour at 2pm with performance at “Transduction” by
Suzanne Reese-Horvitz and Robert Roesch

Their pieces explore the scientific as well as the aesthetic, combining the issues of a “green” world by using solar power to soften and transform the severity of the planes of cor-ten steel which comprise their work. Whereas Roesch’s contribution to the collaboration deals with formal shapes and the raw power of the sculptural medium, Reese-Horvitz adds painterly surface treatments that establish Transduction – Hamilton’s placement in a mapping context.