Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat)

June 8, 2011 – June 6, 2012

Artist Sarah Sze is world-renowned for her intricate installations that shape space with hundreds or thousands of interconnected sculptural elements. For the High Line, Sze has created an elaborate metropolis of perspectival architectural models that are bisected by the High Line path itself. The sculpture forms an open gateway that visually frames the views to the north and south, as well as allows park visitors to physically enter and pass through the space it outlines. The architecture, complex and dynamic, acts as a bird, butterfly and insect observatory, with perches, feeding spots and birdbaths throughout.

Emerging from the shooting perspective lines of the landscape of the High Line, the sculpture extends through space like a perspective drawing in three dimensions. The structure climbs, spins, accelerates, and emphasizes the open trajectory of the High Line and modeling systems of development and growth. The artwork is simultaneously an observatory, an experiment, and a metropolis, evoking urban construction, scientific models, and attempts to capture nature in situ.

(1) Photo by Bill Orcutt; (2-3) Photo by Austin Kennedy; (4) Photo by Sarah Sze.