TIPPET RISE ART CENTER Identity Rebrand, Art Direction
/2019
Tippet Rise Art Center is unlike any other art galleries. You don’t take steps between the artworks; you traverse miles of gravel roads and connecting trails, your view of each piece changing with your distance from it. What looks like a lonely sentinel from afar becomes, up close, a playful giant offering shade. Nothing is what it appears to be.
Tippet Rise is a metaphor. It is an intersection where art, music, land, sky, and poetry can weave together into an algorithm which is greater than the sum of its parts. Music isn’t about notes, anymore than poetry is about words. Notes and words and the angles of a sculpture are just the shadows of the essences which hide behind them. As someone said of the pianist Artur Schnabel: music was just the start of it.
It’s always been obvious to us, among others, that everything is involved in everything else. As Claude Lévi-Strauss said, the work of the painter, the poet or the musician, are the myths and symbols, the most fundamental truths really common to us all.
With Tippet Rise, we’re hoping to provide an environment on the land where these transfers of energy and knowledge can take place. We chose the surreal mountainscape of Montana, just north of Yellowstone, as a territorial metaphor where we sensed that the sky was especially present on the earth, and that a certain stone age magnetism was evident in the volcanic nature of the moraines, eskers, coulees, cirques, bowls, and canyons which would support the metaphors with which we engaged it.
Welcome
A virtual monument is established via the interaction between the visitors and the projection. The captured camera footage is then translated into particles shifting in size and depth; emphasizing on how the world is connected by an invisible grid,.
Land art is an ephemeral object, as well as the sculptures. We wish the visitors can learn to leave their own digital traces; because in the end, noting will be owned but the most precious memories and experience. Meanwhile, the altitudes of the footage made of particles are determined by the volume of surrounding noise, enabling the visitor to view this digital landscape dimensionally through navigating a wooden cube attached with an Arduino board.
It is a transcending experience of recording our present moments, and turning them into a digital landscape.
