It's the rare exhibit that Joe Griffith installs with a Bobcat front loader. But the latest project at Flight 19, an alternative exhibition space housed at downtown Tampa's historic Union Station, called for heavy machinery. Under the direction of New York artist Bob Wysocki, Griffith found himself — along with other members of Experimental Skeleton, the Tampa artist collective that runs the space — manipulating 100,000 pounds, or 36 cubic yards, of sand to create a giant dune inside the gallery. (To see photos of the effort, check out ES's blog at experimentalskeleblog.blogspot.com.) Through the end of October, and possibly longer, the resulting white-golden crescent of sand will be steadily reshaped by the wind power of 44 electric fans.
To anyone who has visited Walter De Maria's legendary The New York Earth Room in Manhattan, Wysocki's adventure at the intersection of earth art and minimalism will have a familiar feel. Inside Earth Room, 250 cubic yards of soil cover 3,600 square feet of floor space, leaving visitors to marvel at an apartment seemingly flooded with 22 inches of dirt. Some visitors come to see the improbable, or to wonder at the spirit of aesthetic experimentation that could have led to the piece's creation in 1977; others come to commune with nature, strangely dumped into man-made space. Wysocki's dune invites similar reactions, from incredulity to hypnotic fascination.
But while Earth Room never changes (though meant to last three months, the DIA Foundation has painstakingly maintained it since 1980), Wysocki's dune is changing constantly. When I visited last week, the sand blob had begun to elongate from its original shape and a tiny shoot of grass had sprung up from the dune's rippled surface. Its title, Post-Metal, alludes to the sand's provenance as a byproduct of industrial sand mining; what you see on the floor at Flight 19 has been stripped of any metal of industrial value, bequeathing the piece a dimension of eco-consciousness.
Post-Metal continues at Flight 19 through Oct. 31. Flight 19 is located at 1004 E. Twiggs St., Tampa, in the baggage claim building at historic Union Train Station on N. Nebraska Ave. Please note Flight 19's limited hours, 12-4 p.m., Sat. and Sun.; call 813-247-2030 to confirm.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2008.