Скачать или смотреть Timelapse: Carl Cheng at The Contemporary Austin

Get a behind-the-scenes look at artist Carl Cheng creating his large-scale sand installation "Human Landscapes – TCA72024," 2024, as part of the exhibition "Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses" at The Contemporary Austin (Sept 6 – Dec 8, 2024).

In 1966, at his Pico Boulevard studio, Cheng developed his first prototype of a sand rake art tool, which, in its earliest iteration, scored lines of sand in crude linear patterns. In 1979, he created another prototype on the second floor of his Santa Monica Pier studio above his "Natural Museum of Modern Art."

With this new device Cheng operated an expanded XY plotter retrofitted with droppers, scrapers, brushes, and drawing tools made from his collected organic specimens to carve into, shape, and smooth over the surface of a bed of sand. The resulting installation was titled "Drawing at the Beach."

Over the years, Cheng has continued to refine this art tool, integrating parts of the original sand rake art tools into newer incarnations that have created increasingly sophisticated installations for venues such as: Artec ’93 in Nagoya, Japan, in 1993; the Sculpture Center in New York in 2000; and REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2022, the latter of which was co-restored by the organizers of this exhibition in preparation for its current presentation.

Fundamentally, the rakes are art tools to be used to create increasingly complex sand drawings. To create the installation Cheng works alone at the site over the course of up to two weeks. Using a controller, he instructs his tool to drag different patterns, drop sand, blow air, and drip water to create a layered intuitive drawing that is erased at the conclusion of the exhibition. A behind-the-scenes look at Cheng’s process can be seen in the related video on view in this gallery.

The sand rake art tool raises methodological questions about the status of the artwork (for example, should the tool also be considered an artwork unto itself?) as well as a profound conundrum around preservation, given the sand drawings’ ephemeral nature and dependence on the artist himself.

Learn more about the exhibition: https://thecontemporaryaustin.org/exh...