Tucked beneath the trees in the center of MetroTech Commons in Brooklyn is L.A.-based artist Sam Falls’s “Untitled (Maze),” a sprawling architectural plan of a sculpture that invites spectators to step inside its walls. It’s part of his “Light Over Time,” a series of works commissioned by the Public Art Fund. Falls, known for boundary-pushing paintings that incorporate sunlight, rain, and other elements into their production process, has built some of those same climatological concerns into this new public work. The sides of each aluminum panel are painted differently, with one surface lacking a protective UV finish; this means that, over the sculpture’s lifespan, the way the light hits the piece will cause it to change and break down in subtle ways. (Just don’t hold your breath — a good five years of light exposure are needed before the process begins, Falls said.)
A similar piece was installed in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, and Falls noticed that children were especially fond of scampering through it, or peeping through the slits and excisions made into some of the panels. They also responded to the palette, which the artist selected based on available stock via the powder-coating outfit he employed for the project — they do a lot of work for Disneyland and custom-car aficionados, he said, and the candy-colored pop of the sculpture reflects that. This all got him thinking about playgrounds in general, leading to a range of new public sculptures which — if not exactly an assortment of swings and slides — are certainly playful.
“I went to Marfa once, and I was blown away,” Falls said when I inquired as to the influence of Donald Judd, whose large-scale industrial boxes his maze resembles in superficial ways. “And then I went back and I was bored. I had changed, and the sculptures were exactly the same. Something in Judd that I was a fan of originally was the commitment to form and space and a dedication to Minimalism that stands the test of time. It’s such a true and honest form, and so specific to itself, that the changing culture and society can’t mess with it. But what that also cuts out of the equation is nature.” Judd-style Minimalism, he said, is also about “how you interact with something in space — but always the space outside the sculpture,” whereas his piece unfolds the closed structure and invites you (and the weather) in. He also cites his new home base in Los Angeles — after an upbringing in Vermont, and a chunk of years in New York — as an influence, with the perhaps more lighthearted touch of Robert Barry or Michael Asher seeping into his own practice.
A short walk from there is a giant, colorful sculpture of a wind chime, a self-referential nod to a series of normal-sized metal chimes Falls once made, later hiding them in various California forests and letting the elements go to work on them for a full year. The emphasis on simple colors and geometric configurations continues with a hydraulic-powered sculpture that’s either a giant scale or a see-saw, depending on who you’re asking; containers on either side of the central post collect, and then pour out, rainwater. Kids will likely push and clang the chimes, which is perfectly OK; less OK if they decide to start crawling on the scale. (Falls balks at the word “interactive,” but does think of all of these sculptures as more or less “kinetic and engaged.”)
Sitting on another corner of the Commons is a pair of rectangular booths, each with a child- or large-dog-sized entryway cut into its facade. Duck inside and you’re ensconced in a Minimalist tomb, any claustrophobia offset by the soothing white interior, and a ceiling made of colorful stained glass. Falls was thinking of Sigmar Polke’s windows for the Grossmünster church in Zurich when he made his sculptures, which he likens to a “private, and secular, chapel. I’m not a spiritual man, but I like the feeling of isolated experience, with nature.” Inside the lobby of One MetroTech Plaza are a series of varyingly exposed photograms that the artist made using the readymade stained glass panels themselves.
But the public commission’s piece de resistance, and the one that Falls himself seems most excited about, is a bench coated with thermochromic panels. Think of it as the outdoor-furniture equivalent of those Hypercolor shirts from the 1980s: The shifting rays of the sun cause the panels to react and change throughout the day. Sitting on the bench or strategically placing objects on it can also influence the surface’s appearance. (I’m predicting an explosion of #samfallsbench Instagram pics, with spectators tricking the piece into their own unique, ephemeral compositions.) The artist has wanted to work with the material for a while now, but it hasn’t made sense in a gallery context for collectors — the fabricator can’t vouch for its longevity beyond three-to-five years outdoors. (“In the art world,” Falls said, “that’s not enough.”)
Taken together, the sculptures in “Light Over Time” are a personal meditation addressing Minimalist form, light, pre-fab materials, the natural flora of the urban square, and what happens to all of these things when an unpredictable public audience is introduced into the mix. Falls originally trained as a photographer, but found it “limiting — you have a picture of time, but you can never access it. With these, there’s a continual access to, and imaging of, time.” He’s often alone when he makes his works — dragging dye-covered foliage onto huge canvases and letting a passing storm create the piece, for instance, as with a group of paintings that will be shown this September in Zurich, Los Angeles, and Pomona, California. Yet he seems to relish this opportunity to open up his methodology to a daily audience, celebrating “things that I find encouraging and empathetic in art, rather than distancing. Dealing with rain, or the sun — it’s a shared reference that can be specific to the work, but also opens up everyone’s world.”
