Carin Mincemoyer’s “Sunshine in Your Smile I and II” displayed in front of Dan Droz’s “Open Doors,” left, and “Totem,” right, and Lydia Musco’s “Fifteenth Uncomformity” at center in the Melvin Johnson Sculpture Garden outside the Strohl Art Center.
While Fowler-Kellogg Art Center and Strohl Art Center play host to the majority of Chautauqua Visual Arts’ exhibitions, the Melvin Johnson Sculpture Garden allows for more organic, unplanned encounters with art on the grounds. So, if you’ve walked by the garden this season, you’ve already encountered the art of Dan Droz, Lydia Musco and Carin Mincemoyer.
“Public and outdoor art is different simply because people are coming upon it,” said Mincemoyer. “They have not chosen to be an art audience. They have not chosen to walk into a gallery and see it.”
For Mincemoyer, public art affords a distinct sense of place and helps to curate a locational identity that is increasingly lost in such an interconnected world.
Musco’s “Logarithmus” stands before Droz’s “Together.”
“It can help to keep places distinct,” she said. “It can also make places more engaging to be (in). We live in an era where a lot of people are staring at their phones or staring at screens all day, and this can draw people out of that — even if it’s just for a brief moment — if there’s something interesting to look at.”
Mincemoyer’s works on view in the sculpture garden explore the concept of beauty and what society deems attractive or not attractive.
The geometric metal sculptures represent the structural formation of diamonds and are adorned with tulips, posing questions about the idea of beauty and how society manipulates natural things to make them conform to imposed standards of beauty.
Mincemoyer chose tulips specifically for her sculptures because of their significance both in the customs associated with them, and how they are selectively bred for aesthetic appeal. She is interested in how people edit, alter and handpick traits to produce desired results.
For Musco, sculpture is a way of understanding the world around her. Her concrete, large-scale creations are an exploration of form and materiality as they interact with the built world.
“The pieces that I’m making are all about my curiosity about the world, about trying to figure out how everything works, how things go together, fit together and how the world is supported or how things give support or need support,” Musco said.
Musco works primarily with concrete because she enjoys the casting process, and because it’s such a ubiquitous material. She’s interested in the mechanics of castable processes and the changing of states from liquid material to solid over time; she sees it as the opposite of reductive work like carving, because she is filling an empty space to create something — rather than removing material.
“(Concrete is) so common, it’s so utilitarian, it’s so ubiquitous. It’s everywhere, but we also don’t see it. This thing is everywhere, but it’s kind of invisible,” she explained. “It’s just this thing that we use, that we take for granted, and we really don’t see it. I was interested in seeing if I could use that material for something that we did see, that we did notice, that was made to be seen.”
Musco said she feels lucky that people want to look at her work, and she’s amazed when people not only take the time to look at the art, but discover new aspects she had not considered.
“It’s such a privilege to have made something that somebody might be thinking about after they left it,” Musco said. “I would hope that they think about why they’re thinking about it. What is it that stuck with them?”
For Droz, sculpture is a way to explore the limits of human perception. His career-spanning background as a product designer and his earlier years as a professional magician led him to an interest in sculpture that investigates how people perceive and engage with space. He views magic as a metaphor for reality.
“We think we’re seeing it all. We think we’re really smart and we’re seeing the truth or we’re seeing all of reality, but, in fact, we’re seeing a very limited part of what is going on,” he explained. “What you see isn’t necessarily what’s there, and that even applies to our own understandings of each other and ourselves. We think we know ourselves, we think we know other people, but the more we learn about them, the more we realize how little we knew.”
Since his background is not in sculpting, but designing, Droz said he feels a great deal of flexibility to work with many mediums, because he’s not necessarily attached to any of them.
“There’s not just the flexibility of using and exploring different materials, but there is a good deal of difference in using one material over another,” he explained. Droz said this doesn’t just impact the abilities of a sculptural form, but also impacts the viewer’s experience engaging with the form.
