NEW YORK, Aug 19 — The Public Art Fund — the non-profit arts organisation promoting contemporary artists in New York’s public spaces — has announced that it will install a miniature redwood forest created by artist Spencer Finch in Brooklyn.

The installation will be at MetroTech Commons, an airy, open zone that hosts summer festivals and outdoor fairs, as well as public art displays.

Spencer Finch, ‘A Certain Slant of Light’ (2014). — Picture courtesy of Spencer Finch/Public Art Fund via AFP

Within a triangular swathe of MetroTech Commons’ lawn, some 4000 young dawn redwoods will be planted. This installation will echo a section of Redwood National Park in California, the location of the tallest trees on earth, at a 1:100 ratio. Trees that range from 98 feet (29.8m) to 380 feet (115.8m) tall will be scaled to between one and four feet (between 0.3 and 1.2m) tall in Brooklyn. Visitors will be able to experience the installation from a viewing platform as well as from ground level.

Finch often utilises a colorimeter — a device that reads the median color and temperature of light — as a means of expressively recreating a certain luminosity. His work Trying To Remember the Colour of the Sky on That September Morning (2014), for which he hand-painted 2983 squares of paper corresponding to every person killed in the September 11 attacks and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, was notably commissioned for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

Spencer Finch, ‘Painting Air’ (2012). — Picture courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum

For this project, Finch collected data by collaborating with the Save the Redwoods League, who supplied such details as forest canopy height maps, and also helped devise a specialised planting and irrigation system to enable the redwoods to flourish despite their atypical environment. When the exhibition reaches its conclusion, the trees will be rehoused.

Emma Enderby, formerly exhibitions curator at London’s Serpentine Galleries and current associate curator at the Public Art Fund, organised the exhibition.

"Spencer Finch: Lost Man Creek” will be on view from October 1, 2016 to May 13, 2018. — AFP-Relaxnews