The Plain of Heaven October 24, 2005

THE PLAIN OF HEAVEN
OCTOBER 14 ? NOVEMBER 20, 2005
820 WASHINGTON STREET @ THE END OF THE HIGH LINE, NYC
12-6 PM, FRIDAY-SUNDAY

Artist conversations Saturdays at 2 P.M.
OCT 15 Helen Mirra, Shannon Ebner, and Saskia Olde Wolbers
OCT 22 Adam Putnam
OCT 29 William Forsythe
NOV 5 Corey McCorkle
NOV 12 Adam Cvijanovic
NOV 19 Paul Ramírez Jonas

SUNDAY, NOV 20, 5:40 ? 6 P.M. Trisha Donnelly?s sound installation will be played once only, during the final 20 minutes of the exhibition.

Creative Time is proud to present ?The Plain of Heaven?, an international exhibition inspired by the impending redevelopment of the High Line, the disused elevated rail structure that runs up the west side of Manhattan.?The Plain of Heaven? takes off from this elegiac and exciting moment of transformation to consider how we imagine, and long for, inaccessible spaces; the relationships between transfiguration, destruction and rebirth; the opposition between nature and the urban environment; and more generally, the way in which we re-mystify the world we already know.
Artists Adam Cvijanovic, Song Dong, Trisha Donnelly, Shannon Ebner, Leandro Erlich, William Forsythe, Sol LeWitt, O. Winston Link, Gordon Matta-Clark, Corey McCorkle, Helen Mirra, Adam Putnam, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Saskia Olde Wolbers contribute works that relate to the complex nature of transformation through sound, drawing, film, video, photography, performance and installation. The majority of the fourteen artists are creating new work specifically for the exhibition.
The twin legacies of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson ? artists who refigured the industrial and urban landscape of the 1970s ? animate much of the show, expanding upon similar concerns about the natural environment that we find in 19th-century sublime landscape painting and 18th-century notions of the ?picturesque.? The exhibition?s title, ?The Plain of Heaven?, adapted from a painting by British artist John Martin (1789 ? 1854), refers to the idea of an elevated, sublime environment that lies just beyond our reach, yet is firmly planted in our aspirations and imagination.
?The Plain of Heaven? is organized by Creative Time curator Peter Eleey, and is housed in a vacant meatpacking warehouse located at the southern end of the Line at Gansevoort Street, which has been its effective terminus since developers demolished the lower portion in 1991. The warehouse was constructed around the High Line in 1939, and includes a loading platform at rail level from which visitors to the exhibition can view the Line. Dia Art Foundation hopes to construct a new museum on this site. This year, the City expects to break ground on a design by Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro that will remake the wild, post-industrial pastoral of the High Line into a public open space.