The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/biennial/)
Ithaca has long been known for its beauty, but for artist Jenifer Wightman grad, that beauty is more than meets the eye. Her most recent exhibit, unveiled this past week at Mann Library, uses microbes to facilitate her creative vision.
The sculptors “moved over 2.5 tons of local soil material by hand to create a custom-poured earth mix,” according to the CCA website.
American Spolia gashes itself out into space like an inverse wound. It spans an unbent and unwavering 140 feet across Libe Slope’s midsection, resting, at its highest, westernmost point, several feet above my head. At each end it terminates bluntly and abruptly. Its thin metal beams are sparse and rudimentary, almost purely utilitarian. Numbering about a dozen, they support, as if extollingly, an imbricated miscellany of wooden panels, each one of its own faded hue.
If you walk around the Cornell campus at this time of the year, you might be surprised by what you find. The Cornell Council for the Arts 2016 Biennial has just started around campus and one of the most capturing installations is the urchin. It is an enormous white structure in the middle of the Arts Quad. You can’t really tell what it is until you start getting closer. That’s when you see the spikes.