Cloud City is lent by Christian Keesee.
Habitat-like, incorporating transparent and reflective materials, the work will also be accessible for visitors—in limited numbers, weather permitting, by timed-ticket entry—to experience its interior realms and exterior vistas via an internal route. Set against Central Park, Manhattan’s skyline, and the expanse of space above and beyond, the installation Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City—part of the artist’s series Cloud Cities/Air Port City—suggests a model for living, interaction, and social exchange. This is be the 15th consecutive single-artist installation for the Museum’s Cantor Roof Garden. Cloud City is the artist’s first major commission in the United States.
Visitors may enter and walk through these habitat-like, modular structures grouped in a nonlinear configuration. Over the past decade, Saraceno has established a practice of constructing habitable networks based upon complex geometries and interconnectivity that merge art, architecture, and science. The multidisciplinary project “Cloud Cities/Air Port City” is rooted in the artist’s investigation of expanding the ways in which we inhabit and experience our environment.
According to artist Tomás Saraceno: “Upside down, Central Park is a flying garden embedded in a cumulus cloud, mirrored buildings and skies appear under your feet, gravity seems to reorient itself, and people are multiplied in patchworks of cloudscape, forming unexpected interconnected networks…Cloud City is an invitation to perceive simultaneously a multiplicity of realities, making overlapping and multireflective connections between things, affecting and challenging our perceptions. Cloud City is a vehicle for our imagination, ready to transport us beyond social, political, and geographical states of mind.”
Venue: The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York. USA.
Dates: May 15 – November 4, 2012.
