May 15, 2008 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or Winner of Two |
Giant poppies spring to life at Arboretum
Driving along Stenton Avenue for the last several weeks, travelers have been both delighted and perplexed by the field of large red flowers that have sprung up just inside the fence of Morris Arboretum. The giant poppies are a new public art installation from locally known artist Gary G. Miller. Titled Papaver Rubrum Giganteum, the installation was the brainchild of Miller, who began work on the project more than two years ago. The sculptural installation consists of 300 ten-foot red poppies made out of aluminum and pvc pipe and randomly “planted” in the Northwestern meadows. Miller originally designed the piece for the Burning Man Festival with a partial grant from the Burning Man Foundation. The Burning Man Festival is an annual artistic experiment in “temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression” and held in the desert. This year’s Burning Man will be held in the Black Rock Desert, 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada over Labor Day weekend. Miller’s previous outdoor large scale public art installations include No Big Thing for the Woodmere Art Museum as part of the 2004 citywide exhibition, The Big Nothing and Inside/Outside: Celebrating Robert Venturi in 2006, also at the Woodmere. He said his pieces use relocation, juxtaposition and modification and scale to challenge the viewer’s perception of what they are looking at. The poppies, for example, sway and bend in the wind, just like real poppies but on a larger more surreal scale. “The large-scale installations are designed for the general public, and visible to multi-generational and sometime accidental audiences,” Miller said in a press release. “They are created to function as celebrations of the ideas and images we hold in common.” The poppies installation will be on display at the arboretum through June 29. Miller is expected to repeat the installation at the Burning Man Project later this year. Contact Associate Editor Jennifer Katz at 215-248-8804 or jenn@chestnuthilllocal.com.
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