SAN DIEGO.-The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) presents Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, opening March 30, 2008, at the Museum’s downtown Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building. On view through June 30, 2008, the exhibition features recent sculptures, drawings, and large-scale installations by world-renowned artist Maya Lin that explore landscape as both form and content, as well as the role technology plays in visualizing and transforming our world.

Organized by the Henry Art Gallery, the exhibition is centered on three large-scale installations, each of which puts the viewer into a distinctive relationship to the scale and shape of the land. 2x4 Landscape, a hill or wave form built with over 50,000 boards set on end, is both a familiar fragment of landscape and a model expanded to massive scale. Water Line, a floating wire-frame topographic “drawing” of an immense undersea formation, can either be walked under or viewed from above. Blue Lake Pass, a 3-D translation of a Colorado mountain range, is made of layers of particle board, segmented into a grid and then pulled apart to create walkways through the landscape strata.

The exhibition also features a series of sculptures based on the water volumes of inland seas, large drawings of landforms and river sheds, and images of Lin’s recent earthworks and architectural projects.

The exhibition, previously on view at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, in St. Louis, Missouri, picks up the thread of her previous museum exhibition, Topologies, continuing its exploration of people’s relationship

to the land. However, it is also a departure, as the first exhibition that has carefully translated the scale and coherence of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum.
Maya Lin: Systemic Landscapes is organized for the Henry Art Gallery by its director Richard Andrews. Major support for this exhibition has been provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Peter Norton Family Foundation.

Over the course of 25 years, Maya Lin has created a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations and intimate studio works. In all of this work, wrote Judith Stein in Art in America, “there is a consistent visual intelligence that transcends categorization.”

An artist who subtly but decisively alters the viewer’s relationship to space and landscape, the artwork’s relationship to natural form and built environment, Lin first came to prominence when she redefined the memorial, with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Since then, she has created works at all scales that re-order our categories of understanding: blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and re-imagining the grids of history, language, and mathematics by which humans encounter the natural world.

Lin’s artwork has been shown in solo museum exhibitions in the United States, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden, and at the Gagosian Gallery, which represents her. Lin’s work looks at the landscape through a 21st century lens, often using technology to re-imagine and re-think what the land is and our relationship to it. A committed environmentalist, her work often asks the viewer to take a closer look at the natural world.

Lin’s best-known works are her large, site-specific art installations. They include Groundswell, for the Wexner Center for the Arts; Wave Field for the University of Michigan; 10 degrees North for The Rockefeller Foundation; and Eclipsed Time for MTA Arts in Transit, for New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The largest to date, eleven minute line, is an earthen line, 1,600 feet long by 12 feet high, traversing a meadow in Kniesling, Sweden. Completed in 2004 for the Wanås Foundation, eleven minute line is the first in a series of works that will explore the character and identity of a line drawing, as experienced on the boundary between two- and three-dimensional space.

Other recent large-scale artworks include Input (2004) for Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, a 3.5-acre array of raised and lowered earthworks inscribed with a text written by the artist’s brother, Tan Lin, about childhood memory and one’s connection to a place; Flutter (2005), a 20,000 square-foot sculpted earthwork, reminiscent of the patterns cast on the ocean floor by waves, for the Federal Courthouse; and A Garden of Perception (2005) for the School of the Arts of the University of California, Irvine. Lin’s studio-scale artworks are in the permanent
collections of major institutions throughout the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, and in numerous private collections.

Maya Lin is the recipient of numerous awards. Most recently she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, becoming the youngest artist ever to be so honored. She also has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work was chronicled in the documentary film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (Academy Award, best feature-length documentary, 1996), and she has been a subject of the program Art 21: Art in the 21st Century on PBS. The national press has focused on her consistently over the years, from Time magazine (which included her in its list of “Fifty for the Future” in 1994) to Smithsonian (which in 2005 selected her as one of “35 Who Made a Difference”).