BARELY THERE
After writing earlier this summer about how difficult it is to work successfully at the junction of art and architecture, I came across an installation that does just that: Karolina Kawiaka’s Fractured Reflections, currently on display outdoors at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, Vermont. Kawiaka, who was trained as both an artist and architect, created the piece “deliberately as a folly." But it engages, deeply, concerns of art, architecture, landscape and theater.
The structure cuts an elegant, barely-there, figure in the landscape. It’s a pavilion five feet wide, eight feet long and eight feet tall, constructed from narrow galvanized steel angles set in a Mondriaan-like grid. It can be entered through high slots on each of its four sides, and its inside remains open to the sky above and the ground below. Selected openings in the frame are filled with mirror panels, that capture partial reflections of the lawn, shrubs and trees all around, and of visitors themselves as they move through. The structure complicates the landscape, weaving fleeting micro-views into a lush, cinematic spectacle.
What’s most remarkable about the piece is how quiet its forms are. With its platonic, cube-like proportions and skeletal skin, it looks like the diagram of a structure more than a structure itself. Its materials, which can be found at a lumber yard, give it the feeling of an apparatus rather than an artwork. And it doesn’t interfere with the ground, touching it only along the bottom edges. As both an artist and an architect, Kawiaka has an admirably light touch. Without minimal means, she has fashioned a structure with an fine, complex presence.