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Landshaping
Exhibit highlights work by UMass Amherst-educated landscape architects
You traverse a campus, public square, urban plaza, or some other outdoor built environment and find yourself, perhaps only half consciously, admiring its grace, scale, and aptness. You might not realize that in all likelihood you are savoring the work of a landscape architect.
As of this year, landscape architecture has been taught for a century at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In celebration of that milestone, the University Gallery has mounted an exhibition titled The Intimate Expanse: Recent Works of Alumni of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. It includes workdesigns for cities, towns, neighborhoods, parks, and personal gardens in the U.S., Europe, and Asiaby more than 100 graduates of what at this point in its evolution is the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. The exhibition opened February 1, will begin a hiatus on March 12, and will again be on display between March 23 and May 14.
Presented in memory of the late Professor Barrie Greenbie, a longtime mainstay of the department, The Intimate Expanse was organized and designed by Professor Joseph S. R. Volpe and undergraduate students Brendan Carey, Mathew Foley, Thomas Hand, Preston Holleman, Thomas Lipka, and Shane Mahoney. Betsy Siersma, director of the University Gallery, notes that the exhibition is unique for the gallery in not being designed in house: Volpe and the students selected and edited digital and slide images for each of the 12 projections in the main gallery, created an installation for the north gallery, and collaborated with gallery staff on many details of design and display.,” Siersma says.
The exhibition encompasses three gallery spaces, each with its own theme:
- “The Landscape Documented” projects images and texts at different speeds and in varying patterns to create a dynamic, ever-changing light show of works by such program alumni as Stephen Stimpson, Shane Coen, Patrick Condon, Paul Bukus, Ellin Goetz, and Frank Sleegers. It also documents the restoration of a James Rose garden by UMass alumni under the creative direction of Dean Cardasis, construction by landscape-contracting alumni from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture under the guidance of Michael Davidsohn, a New England town-planning project by Zenia Z. Kotval, and research on regional landscape patterns by Jack Ahern
- “The Garden of Expression,” a serial compilation of overlapping images projected on its gallery’s walls, floor, and ceiling, is continually altered for viewers by their passage through the room. Image sequences are randomly timed to emulate the element of chance that colors our experience of even the most elaborately designed landscapes.
- “Animated Landform Spaces” includes digital imagery by Stephen Ervin. He uses computer landscape modeling to perceive landscape patterns created by landforms, water, plants, and structures and to define how they affect human spatial experiences.
The University Gallery is on the lower level of the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall. It is open to the public Tuesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m., and on evenings during which performances are presented in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall. For further information, call (413) 545-3670 or visit the University Gallery Web site.