"The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef" Exhibition
Broadway Windows
This event has ended.
Broadway Windows announces an exhibition curated by Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring. On view from April 5 through May 18, the installation is mounted in five windows at the corner of Broadway and East Tenth Street, and is lighted 24 hours a day.
Brightly colored, hooked and knitted yarn assumes the wondrous shape of an ever-expanding coral reef. Crocheted creatures are gently nestled by the black sand sea floor, and each underwater organism seems to bend and sway in response to imagined ocean currents. Sea anemones clutch neighboring rocks, while the iridescent orange, pink and red tentacles of the live coral reach out for plankton in a fantastical, pseudo-tropical realm.
The Wertheim sisters grew up in Queensland close to the Great Barrier Reef. Keenly aware of the reef's vulnerability in an era of global warming and coral die-off, they conceived the crochet coral reef project to champion nature's cause. "The project develops along the lines of a living reef, for it grows and spawns as participants are engaged. Like living coral, it is a colonial organism, with each constituent polyp adding beauty and scale to the whole. It's not solely ... the finished work that matters, but the very process of its production. A process that is collective and collaborative---both a celebration of traditional feminine craft, and an homage to the power of women's labor. It all began with the seed of hyperbolic geometry."
Media
Schedule
from April 15, 2008 to May 18, 2008