​Several years ago some of Orange County’s leading artists looked to the hangars and runways of the former MCAS El Toro for inspiration. They wandered the grounds, took photos and painted images of the place while it was in a sort of purgatory between its role as a working base and its future as the Orange County Great Park. Known as the Legacy Project Collaborative, many of the works depicted the concrete structures beginning to decay, as nature took back what once had been its domain.
One of the people who explored and memorialized the base was Laguna Beach artist Jorg Dubin. His paintings formed the first exhibition at the Great Park Gallery in 2011.
So it’s appropriate, somehow, that the current exhibit at the Great Park Gallery deals with similar themes; though it’s a decade or so later in a time when the future of the Great Park is becoming present.
The exhibit is called “Balance,” and brings together artists who are looking at the interface between nature and human activities and structures. The human side of things is often symbolized by concrete, as in the building material.
Artist Andrew Woodward’s work at the gallery consists of living trees planted in cubes of concrete. Not square planters made out of concrete, mind you. Rather they are suspended sculptures of green and gray where it can be difficult to tell where the living plant begins and the inorganic mass that encases the trees ends. Though the trees are encased in the concrete, the roots can still absorb water through the porous walls.
Other artists examine the theme in quite different ways, including tiny, intricate treehouses built around houseplants by Jedediah Corwyn Voltz; a video installation by Isabelle Hayeur; and a display of photos, maps and recorded interviews from a 3,000-mile roadtrip Marissa Gawel took for National Geographic to document homemade roadside attractions.
While some elements of the exhibit are introspective, even precious, photos of the magnificent Storm King sculpture park in New York are inspiring. We recommend anyone working on the future Cultural Terrace area of the Orange County Great Park see it for inspiration—if not the actual 500-acre sculpture park, then the photos at the Great Park.