Anna Schuleit, Waterside

Lovells Island

Please note: this project has closed. The other Art on the Harbor Islands projects will remain on view through October 8.

Winner of a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship, Anna Schuleit has created a number of large-scale installations that explore architecture and abandoned spaces. Bloom (2003) filled the Massachusetts Mental Health Center with 28,000 flowers just prior to ceasing operation, and Habeas Corpus (2000) was a sound installation in the former Northampton State Hospital.

Waterside takes us inside Schuleit's artistic process. Having spent extensive time on Lovells Island–she lived in a yurt there last summer–Schuleit is fascinated by its peculiar mix of crumbling military ruins and rugged, natural beauty. Housed in a yurt similar to Schuleit's temporary island home, Waterside is a display of models, drawings, and artist's books that imagine two ambitious site-specific projects. Intertidal would place 10-foot-high, mirror-like walls in the island's intertidal zones, reflecting sea, sky, bathers, and the decaying artillery structures, symbolically reversing their purpose. Sightlines, a series of four large-scale drawings etched on a rare grade of glass, would be situated on Fort Standish's gun emplacements, reflecting and refracting the changing light.