P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Pool, a site—specific installation by Meg Webster located in the newly redesigned first-floor duplex gallery. The new work deals with the powerful impact of nature and space. Though Webster indirectly evokes environmental concerns, her main concern is an insistence on the ephemeral qualities of nature and the primal experience of direct perception.
Pool consists of a water—filled room in which several large stepping stones are placed, allowing the viewer to walk up to the edge of the water. A pump lifts water up to the ceiling, dropping it in one solid stream, creating surface movement and special sounds, as well as drawing attention to the height of the space. A strong light and shaped reflectors create sequences of bounced light that illuminate the goldfish that swim among the rocks. In creating a work that surrounds the viewer as he/she is permitted to move around the rocks and feed the fish, Webster manages to enhance a sense of place.
Like much of Webster’s work since the 1980s, Pool attempts to activate some of the sensations of nature and to create an art that works out of the arrangement of the perceptual presence of bodies (water, stone, light, living creatures) within pedestrian space. Sensation and matter in their prime state is the subject of the installation as well as one’s perception of it. Pool also speaks to notions of outside and inside; it tries to suggest that architecture can be broken with outdoor elements and natural systems moving into it. It does not create spectacle but a quiet calming experience. Additionally, the ephemeral nature of things—proof that things are mutable—is an important aspect of Webster’s art: over time, works such as Pool reflect the changes that take place in response to one’s environment.
Born in San Francisco in 1944, Webster studied at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia where she received her BFA in 1976. Upon completing her MFA from Yale University in 1983, the artist moved to New York City and began producing a consistently strong and unified body of work. From the beginning of her artistic career, she chose to merge the organic and geometric, as well as landscape and architecture. Webster believes the human—land relationship has gone awry, and both her early minimalist, earth-based gallery sculpture and her elaborate landscape projects invite viewers to reflect on their primal habitat. As she states, “I am struck by the dichotomy of landscape for nature and landscape for man...[I try] to integrate those two things, to create a circle.”