Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar will create a poetic new project, Park of the Laments, located in a meadow inside 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park. The form of the park is a square within a square, one rigid and made of green hedges, the other soft and organic, made of indigenous trees. Visitors will arrive outside of the park and descend into a long, dark, underground tunnel. Moving towards the light end, viewers will find three sets of stairs that will lead them above ground into the center of the park. Natural, minimalist wooden benches will be placed around the amphitheater of stairs, allowing visitors to sit quietly and meditate within the park, walled off by the natural fence made of greenery and sky. Jaar describes the park as a refuge, a place where we can lament and purge the global atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Born in Chile in 1956, Alfredo Jaar is internationally recognized for his provocative installations and public projects investigating contemporary socioeconomic issues. Trained as an architect and filmmaker, he incorporates photography, film, text and sculpture into works that look to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Jaar’s public artworks include a 1987 Public Art Fund commission A Logo for America, which appeared on the Spectacolor Lightboard in New York’s Times Square. Since then, Jaar has made works drawn from first hand witness and research of such issues as toxic waste in Africa and the genocide in Rwanda. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at Telefonicam in Santiago, Museo d’Arte Contemporaneo in Rome, and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne.

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Image Credit: Artist Rendering, Alfredo Jaar 2008