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In The Shallows Artist Statement
“I don’t know what to say.
I found myself over my head in icy water walking in a forest of kelp. Though it can get much taller, in that cove the kelp was about my height, and there we were, the kelp, uncountable other forms of life, and me, in the shallows of the sea. The kelp forest was vast; no comprehensible single plant, no perceivable limit to the millions of them, or to the vast one of them.
The band of earth and air we occupy is shallow. Here is where we see all the beauty and do all the damage, where the roots are tangled, and the branches torn. I’ve sought to work here consciously – well, where else? – to probe this realm and study it through paper, ink, clay, and the rest.”
Artist Bio
Amy Landesberg is an Atlanta based artist and architect, and her work overlaps this boundary in content, complexity, and scope. Two extremes of scale have characterized it: One is the hyper-personal, intimate, and complicatedly feminine scale of, for example, Sprouts, the piece of linoleum flooring sprouting false eyelashes from the project Things Grow Hair; the other is the overtly public, civic and architectural scale of Autoplast, a 2-part installation for the San Diego Airport that explores our disposition to cars through a strategic re-figuration of some of their parts. Two giant walls co-designed by the artist host installations of hundreds of Hyundai Elantra taillights and thousands of generic side view mirrors composed to mimic natural behaviors. Though the work varies widely in form, at base is an exploration of nature as it is filtered through the economic and industrial systems in which it is ubiquitously enmeshed in the 21st century.
Landesberg has participated in the design of an unusually wide array of projects: galleries and art complexes; civic and educational buildings; rapid rail; historic preservation; residences; theater environments; retail spaces; etc. This diversity of experience has enabled an unusual ability for cross pollination of ideas and solutions. Landesberg approached architecture from a career in the arts with 20 solo exhibitions to her credit as well as numerous group shows in gallery and museum settings. Her efforts have been recognized with awards and grants in both art and architecture including Fellowships in painting and sculpture from the Southern Arts Federation, the Young Architects Award from the Architectural League of New York, several Merit Awards from the Georgia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, an Honor Award from the Southern Atlantic Region of the American Institute of Architects, an Award of Excellence from the Atlanta Urban Design Commission, and a Year-In-Review award from the Americans for the Arts Public Art Program.
Landesberg studied art at Georgia State University and architecture at Yale. She has taught design in art and architecture schools throughout the US including Princeton, Columbia, Tulane and Georgia State. She was the Trott Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ohio State, and more recently the TVS Design Distinguished Studio Critic at the Georgia Tech College of Design.