Paula Hayes’s “Gazing Globes” offers a different way to look at Madison Square Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
MAD. SQ. ART
Madison Square Park
23rd to 24th Sts. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Daily through April 19, free
www.madisonsquarepark.org
www.paulahayes.com
gazing globes slideshow
In exhibits such as “Nocturne of the Limax maximus” at MoMA and “Land Mind” at Lever House, visual artist and landscape designer Paula Hayes created living botanical environments, terrariums that held plants and fish while emphasizing the relationship between humanity and nature. Now Hayes, who was born in Massachusetts and is based in New York City, has incorporated outdated technology into the mix with “Gazing Globes,” an illuminating site-specific display in the southwest gravel section of Madison Square Park. Eighteen glass orbs, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-four inches in diameter, sit on fiberglass pedestals of varying heights between two and four feet, filled with detritus from analog radios, electronic transistors, vacuum tubes, rubber tires, and other technological and industrial waste, along with crystals, forming futuristic miniature postapocalyptic cities of blue, green, purple, gold, and black, layered with dust made from crushed CDs. The spheres change with the weather and the time of day, morphing from snow globes to colorful crystal balls to enchanting glowing orbs at night as they also reflect the surrounding architecture of the Flatiron District. As spring heats up and Teresita Fernández’s massive, five-hundred-foot-long “Fata Morgana” goes up in the park, “Gazing Globes” will mutate yet again, offering yet more fascinating glimpses into our past, present, and future.