Reflections of an Urban Landscape

The sculptures in Reflections of an Urban Landscape were especially designed for this six-month exhibition.

This installation is sponsored by the Public Art Fund and The Rotunda Gallery in cooperation with the Office of Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden, the N.Y.C. Department of Parks & Recreation, Hon. Henry Stern, Commissioner, the Mayor’s Office, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Tom Aprile, Family Room with View
Tom Aprile’s Family Room with View is part of “Reflections of an Urban Landscape,” an exhibition of three outdoor, site-specific works. Aprile (1953 -2010, b. Cleveland, OH) explained, “Those that have been in New York for some time don’t seem to take notice of all the sculpture in their midst. The indiscriminate mixture of buildings, signs and roads and the shapes they create have become a motif in my drawings and sculptures since moving here from the Midwest less than a year ago. When I first saw Walt Whitman Park I was immediately drawn to the clusters of bushes and trees throughout the area. At the entrance of the park near the Red Cross building is a particularly large group of bushes, which I chose to be part of my proposed piece.

“My piece demonstrates the contrast between landscape and cityscape, as well as private and public places. Set in the chosen cluster of bushes are five 14-16 foot generic skyscrapers painted various colors. On top of the buildings are pieces of furniture including three chairs, a couch, and a coffee table. To further accentuate the difference between the grown and manufactured, I made the decision to cover the furniture with lawn-grass carpet—softening its hard edges with manmade “nature.” The whole picture I strove to give the viewer was one of distinctly different ‘places’ functioning together. Private vs. public, building vs. tree, furniture vs. grass, and hard edge vs. soft – in other words an experience of the whole city in one spot.”

Elka Gould, Heart Transplant
Elka Gould’s Heart Transplant is a red and blue, welded-steel sculpture consisting of three 9’ tree-like forms interconnected by a “heart” and sections of “veins” and “arteries,” which surface at irregular intervals among the “trees.” These forms suggest the presence of an enormous, life-giving circulatory system submerged within the earth. Gould introduces these biomorphic forms in an unexpected context to create a living landscape, which suggests lingering natural life in an urban landscape supported by artificially induced means.

Ed Rothfarb, Athos
Ed Rothfarb’s Athos is a large-scale, concrete and reinforced cardboard tri-wall construction that resembles a cavernous mountain. The geometric planar structure has elements of Eastern Orthodox iconography in which naturalistic forms are expressed in art as geometric ideals rather than as representational recreations.