building bullets, show-
cases Laky’s bravura
use of color.
language; Laky communicated primarily through the visual and
physical process of making art. She had been deliberating over an
appropriate symbol—something that could be understood in multiple
languages—and seven days after she arrived, her arrow was com-
plete. Late in the afternoon, a few local adults appeared, their own
tools in hand, and hoisted Laky’s 12-foot arrow into a vertical posi-
tion. The artist called it
Connect.
Over time Laky has come to realize that she often works best
when the situation is a little out of control. “We have to trick our
brains sometimes,” she remarked during her Archives of American
Art interview. “Our culture prepares us for the mundane, the re-
dundant.
.. the keeping-it-organized part, whereas with creative
work—you’ve got to open up those sections of the brain that make
a little lightbulb connection.” Laky recalls the critic Robert Hughes
identifying a similar concern in the methods of the Surrealist artists:
how does one prepare for the unexpected? But she takes it a step
further: “How do I use my knowledge and my training to
promote
the unexpected?”
In what may be her most ambitious effort yet to blend skill with
unexpected possibilities, and link outside with in, Laky collaborated
with the landscape architects Kathryn Gustafson and Mikyoung
Kim to create art guidelines for an expansive 130-acre campus-the
new headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in Silver
Spring, Maryland. In many ways, the guidelines echoed the highly
ordered but seemingly chaotic structure of Laky’s own artwork.
The FDA had not requested a standard art plan, prescribing certain
sculptures for specific locations. Instead, they were looking for
what Jennifer Gibson, fine arts program manager for the Office
of the Chief Architect (the General Services Administration
department overseeing the project), describes as “approaches
to vast space.”
The FDA campus includes millions of square feet of offices and
laboratories. Laky’s team endeavored to keep their plan conversely
simple. They proposed three guidelines for commissioning art in-
stallations, among them that each installation should figuratively
connect man-made elements with the natural environment. To
encourage artists to think beyond a single spot, the team’s art master
plan divided the site into interior and exterior areas and recom-
mended that each installation overlap three different parts of the
campus-for example, an interior lobby, a parking area and a run-
ning path. Artists should be encouraged to utilize a wide range of
media-light, for example, earth, recycled materials or water.
Laky illustrated the potential of a water installation by describing
a trip through the bottom of the Grand Canyon: at different times
of day, without warning, water would begin pouring from the can-
yon walls, the remnants of a distant rainfall. In one area, it might
pound down the rocks; in another, spray from a gully; and in a third,
bleed silently through the stone. In the best-case scenario, the FDA
artists might consider their installations with similarly expansive
sensibilities: by running inventive threads through unrelated areas
of campus, their installations might prompt new lines of thinking,
not unlike the unexpected insights—the “lightbulb connections”-
that have expanded Laky’s personal interior creative landscape.
The first proposals for art installations are approaching final
060 american craft apr/may 09
Photo/Bob Hsiang.
