Site Specific Installations   

Since the opening of the new Albany International Airport terminal in 1998, an Art & Culture Program has been instituted that is committed to showcasing the artistic and cultural resources of the Capital Region. A comprehensive exhibition program that features the work of regional artists, area museum collections as well as national traveling exhibitions, has enhanced the environment of the airport, raised the visibility of the area's cultural institutions and identified the program as a national model for public art.

The Art & Culture Program invites artists to submit proposals for the creation of site-specific work throughout the terminal. The projects are usually a direct response to the architectural and environmental characteristics of the proposed sites. Proposals must include preliminary drawings and a project budget which are reveiwed by an exhibition committee. Since these installations are in many ways defined by the space around them, their existence is often conceived and constructed on the site. Selected artists receive a $2,500 honorarium and the installations remain in the terminal for a minimum of two years.

For more information about the Art & Culture Program's site specific installations, please call 518.242.2241 or email arts@albanyairport.com.

Current Installations

· Second Floor, Concourse B

Kenneth Ragsdale, The Quest, Foam board, digital print, 2007	The Quest, detail
It is natural that any traveler, regardless of their immediate circumstances, should fantasize about what might lie ahead, while at the same time recalling the places they’ve left behind. In The Quest, Kenneth Ragsdale conjures a nostalgic portrait of the classic family voyage with his half-scale model of a 1965 Vista Cruiser station wagon towing a 1950’s style travel trailer. The large-scale drawing is a two-dimensional pattern for the vehicles, which reveals their careful linear construction. An unfamiliar shape contained within that drawing is what Ragsdale describes as a ‘monster,’ a common entity in his work that hovers over homes, vehicles, fields and trees. This ambiguous form personifies the murky abstraction of memory and time that separates us from one another. While much of this work examines the elusiveness of memory, it is reconstructed here with razor-sharp precision. Foam-board sections, like past events, are folded in on one another, interlocking to create forms that rise up out of their flat repose and take on shapes that chronicle traveling through time.

Third Floor, Observation Area

Edward Mayer, Oculus Block, Zinc plated steel and wire, 2005	Oculus Block, detail
At the core of this piece, as in all of Mayer’s work, is his concern with the repetition of modular forms, the reuse and transformation of everyday objects, a preoccupation with linearity and transparency and the creation of a delicate balance between order and chaos. Oculus Block is a 9 foot cube of wired together, garden-variety tomato frames. The multiplicity of these common items and their web of intersections create a structure whose tunnels and surfaces seem to endlessly open and shift, inviting the navigation of both a six sided ‘block’ and an intricate interior pattern of cones, circles, spheres and diamonds.

Second Floor, Concourse B

Flying Fish, Lillian Mulero Digital print on vinyl, 2006
A Flying Fish darts through both sea and sky in this work that transforms our view to an aquarium of great proportions. The massive silver bodies of planes and fish overlap against the blue of air and water in this visual pun meant to cleverly delight and displace.

First Floor, Concourses A & B, 2nd Floor, Concourse A, B & C

Tree / Sonnet Project, Paul Katz Oil and sand on canvas
William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, poems that tell of love, jealousy, youth, age, art, death and desire. Paul Katz has set himself the task of making paintings that both embody these sonnets and serve as a personal memorial to them. After a long layover one day at Albany International Airport, Katz envisioned the paintings hanging where travelers could contemplate the words and imagery while they await their departure. Katz begins each painting by layering sand and glue over stretched canvas, elevating some areas to create a sculptural surface. After painting the entire canvas black, he writes the sonnet with red oil paint on the low-relief areas, methodically avoiding punctuation and normal line breaks. The succession of words is broken instead by the raised forms of an emerging landscape of trees and rocks. Upon reaching the end of the poem, he begins again with the first word, lending a cyclical quality to the form.

Second Floor, Business Center

Work On the Fly, LORI ANDERSON
Work on the Fly was inspired by the well known Japanese haiku: In this world even butterflies must earn their keep. In the second floor Business Center each computer mousepad and screen saver features a haiku, superimposed with images of butterflies and dragonflies, providing a flash of inspiration about the transformative power of work.

Second Floor, Concourse A

Praise Song For The Traveler, DRUIS BEASLEY
This poem was written in praise of travelers and "...for dreams of flying as birds do." To complement the praise poem, Beasley pays homage to Ogun the Yoruba force of nature represented by iron with an altar piece that reflects current tools and technology of the airport.

First Floor, Baggage Claim

Best Wishes, NANCY KLEPSCH
Imprinted directly on the baggage claim belts, Best Wishes consists of three poems, Ibiza, A Blessing for Two and Here's to a Beautiful Day, that reflect an international travel diary, a blessing and a glimpse of a glorious weekend.

Past Installations

Second Floor, Concourse B

Cara Nigro
Digital photographic inkjet prints
2005

Left to Right: Vesperae, Domine, Rabboni II, Welcome to Welcome	Vesperae
Surrounded by ornate gold frames, these "word-scapes" echo both lobby advertising and fine art. Within this surprising juncture, the artist invites viewers to contemplate “love revealed through people and nature as a unique transcendent reflection or directional.” Nigro views each poem as “a proposal to choose and celebrate love - the most enriching and important experience in life.” The compositional elements that distinguish each piece, such as color, typeface and placement of text serve to render these concepts more vivid, while also evoking what we visually associate with menus, movie posters, and playbills. An airport is a prime location for advertisers, who seek to project their services to a regional and international community of travelers. These four poems, citing travel and the transporting qualities of love intersect with familiar design formulae for advertising in a way that playfully piques our awareness of our visual surroundings as well as the fluidity with which product marketing, art and poetry can effectively intertwine.

Third Floor, Observation Area

Watervliet Pablo Helguera, 2007, mixed media installation	Installation view of Simple Gifts, Pablo Helguera, 2002, Silk screen print on vinyl
The installation Watervliet, presented in partnership with the Shaker Heritage Society, was inspired by a Shaker map in the collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art. Established in 1776, the first Shaker community, “Watervliet,” consisted of vast land holdings in the area now known as the Town of Colonie. Where Albany International Airport travelers now observe the busy traffic of the runways, extensive Shaker vegetable, herb and rose gardens once flourished. Artist Pablo Helguera utilizes the Shaker map of the property as a visibly important part of this work, linking geographic areas and Shaker landmarks to photographs and a video that documents Shaker history and the changes that have taken place at the Watervliet site. The Airport’s Art & Culture Program is committed to showcasing the legacy of the Shakers and the mission of the Shaker Heritage Society through long-term exhibitions such as this one, in which Shaker dance, music, architecture and personal narratives are explored through a variety of media.

Second Floor, Concourse B

Untitled, Baris Karayazgan Marble, plastic wrap	Untitled, Detail
Much of sculptor Baris Karayazgan's work involves traditional marble carving techniques, in which stone is removed to reveal a desired shape. For these three ethereal, hovering forms, however, the artist carefully salvaged discarded chips to build new and surprising configurations. Karayazgan used plastic cling film to bind small pieces of marble into curious, organic, tentacle-like structures. This unconventional pairing of materials enabled the artist to quickly manipulate forms and change direction with intuitive spontaneity. Marble has historically been used to express what is splendid, precious and pristine, its luminous surface granting elegance and grace to whatever subject inhabits it. Plastic wrap, on the other hand, is revered mainly for its sandwich-wrapping and casserole-covering capabilities, its glossy, surface signaling freshness. In this installation's improbable meeting, the plastic enables the marble to take on shape and surface qualities that it could otherwise not achieve, while the nearly four hundred pounds of marble in each sculpture redefine plastic's reputation for flimsy transparency.

First Floor, Baggage Claim Area

Cube: Descending the Escalator, Anthony Garner Painted Aluminum	Cube: Descending the Escalator
How fitting, the artist thought, that in a place defined by travel, a person should be rewarded for the simple and necessary journey of going down an escalator or staircase. While the colorful segments in this sculpture intersect in different ways as one moves around and beneath them, it is when riding down the escalator that one sees the separate pieces align themselves into a cube, and then slide apart again. A visual puzzle, a trick of perspective, this installation was painstakingly created for this site, and if moved only a few inches, would fall out of its delicate perceptual balance. The momentary connection of these scattered elements into a solid cube will hopefully delight the weary traveler, and give new pleasure to a familiar activity. It may also leave us looking more closely for the unexpected and elusive in the world around us.

Second Floor, Stairwell

Garden of My Dreams, Victoria Palermo Rubber, synthetic grass	Garden of My Dreams, Detail
Remove seeds, take away water, lose the earth, suspend the laws of nature. And so what's next? Try objects of the imagination, shapes round and voluptuous, gourds shiny but empty. Make a garden for your dreams. Described by the artist as "gourds shiny, but empty," these brightly colored, voluptuous sculptures gather in a garden of sorts, sprouting strange flowers and fruit. Familiar, but not quite of this world, the shiny, poured rubber forms grow from a smooth white ground as well as a patch of absurdly vibrant synthetic grass. A low, curvilinear fence separates the viewer and the 'garden,' emphasizing the botanical qualities of the installation, while acting as a physical barrier between visitors and the enticing but delicate sculptures. Victoria Palermo composes these visions of impossibly radiant, symmetrical and glossy growth with humor, playfulness and subtlety. Such qualities inspire curiosity and wonder among people of all ages, and resonate with the art sophisticate and novice alike.

Second Floor, Concourse B (October 2000 – August, 2005)

When Great Aunt Gert Goes Traveling, LORI ANDERSON
This poem was a modified villanelle that played on the idea of a children's memory game. In the poem Great Auntie packs a traveling bag, moving through the alphabet item by item (accordion, bazooka, cookie cutter, doll...). Airport travelers were invited to write their own villanelle beginning with the phrase... When I Go Traveling... choosing from a wall-mounted magnetic vocabulary to complete their own poem.

Second Floor, Concourse B (October 2000 – June 2005)

Refugee, BELLE GIRONDA

Refugee represented the surface life of the airport with its coming and going, haunted by travelers' dreams of people and places they have left behind. "Home" is often most present in our imaginations when we are separate from it. The piece appeared as an oversized postcard that invited airport patrons to take postcards and write their own message about coming home and leaving home. Internet presence was combined with airport presence as the postcards were mailed back to the poet and posted on a website for all to view.

Second Floor, Concourse B (October 2000 – October 2005)

hangar round, JIL HANIFAN
Contained within a circular window "hangar round" was a word simultaneity that fused word and location, juxtaposing poetry and architecture to invite connections between text and context. The spatial poetry shifted both form and meaning as the reader jumped tic-tac-toe from word to word, suggesting reveries of flight and return to travelers waiting at the gates between arrival and departure.

First Floor, Baggage Claim (November 2000 – November 2003)

Circle, NANCY KLEPSCH Imprinted directly on the baggage belts, Circle is a poem about love, travel and circles, and is meant to be read in its entirety, in "couplets", or in a single line, as passengers wait for their bags to arrive. As Circle was eventually worn away by baggage, it was replaced by Best Wishes, above

Second Floor, Concourse A (November 2000 - January 2001)

Twin Peeks, EDWARD MAYER Steel, plastic
The two towers of Twin Peeks consisted of 800+ cylinders, each measuring 18" x 12" in diameter and held in place with plastic zip ties. Each tower was 27' tall and grew through the atrium into a reflector of the existing terminal lighting, as if the light source might have had an impact on its growth. Though massive in volume, the towers appeared light and weightless and underwent significant alteration as the changing natural light from above alternated with the artificial light over the course of any 24 hour period.

Sharon Bates, Director
Art & Culture Program
Albany International Airport Gallery hours:
7:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m. daily.
For additional information phone: 518.242.2241 or email arts@albanyairport.com

Copyright © 2004 Albany International Airport. All Rights Reserved