Forrest Myers is off the wall at Catskill Art Space this summer

Catskill Art Space (CAS), in Livingston Manor, NY, has devoted its first floor to presenting the work of Forrest ‘Frosty’ Myers this summer. Formerly known as Catskill Art Society, the venue has been exploring the contemporary art practices of emerging and established artists since 1971, and recently underwent a major renovation and expansion, reopening in October 2022.

Forrest Myers at Catskill Art Space

Myers’ work occupies three first-floor galleries, while on the second floor are permanent installations of James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Ellen Brooks and Francis Cape. 

Myers is best known for The Wall, a minimalist installation covering an entire wall on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street in Manhattan, completed in 1973 (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) and popularly known as the ‘Gateway to Soho’. He has revisited the piece’s colourful T-shaped beams in a new, site-specific work at Catskill Art Space. Mounted on the exterior façade, it makes a clear visual connection to The Wall.

‘It was my wife, Debra Arch Myers, who had the idea to fabricate 42 additional Green-Ts or “projections” that are on The Wall, and place them on buildings around the world,’ Myers reveals. ‘It was [CAS executive director] Sally Wright’s idea to affix one permanently on the outside of the building in Livingston Manor. The way that this piece works is the viewer looks at a Green-T attached to a building and draws a mental “line” from that spot back to The Wall on Houston and Broadway. It’s a type of Earth-bound space travel.’

He adds, ‘Frank Stella famously said, “If it looks like art, it probably isn’t.” Even now there seems to be a mystery to the artwork that can’t be explained. Part of its appeal is the way the sun comes across the projections in the morning, creating shadows like a gnomon on a sundial. This draws a line from you to the wall then to the sun. This triangle is part of the art experience. Or maybe you just like the vibration of the colours. Whatever it is, it remains an attraction.’

At Catskill Art Space, highlights of Myers’ solo exhibition include early sculptural work from the 1960s and the furniture that he started making in 1969. He worked with singular sheets of metal, creating reductive folds and bends to shape benches, chairs and tables; these furniture experiments later evolved into beds, chairs and tuffets made from long segments of pipes, springs and coils.

‘Designing a great chair is different from sculpture only in that it has certain measurement and angle rules that must be met for it to be useable. Beyond these constraints lies “Art Furniture”’, he says. ‘Usable sculpture is an oxymoron, few artists have been successful at this – think Gerrit Rietveld, Frank Gehry, Mark di Suvero. For my furniture to be successful, I must first experience it as a sculpture and then discover that it can be used as a piece of furniture.’ 

catskillartspace.org

Forrest Myers is now on view until 26 August 2023

Catskill Art Space48 Main StreetLivingston Manor, NY 12758