It’s been running for the whole summer, but I finally got to the Olafur Eliasson exhibit at Chicago’s MCA earlier today. The first photo below appears in a New York Times article on Eliasson from last year.

What I loved in the Take Your Time exhibit at the MCA was the actively pursued idea that nature itself, seen with new eyes, can provide for us endless supplies of beauty – especially when seen in new juxtapositions, compilations, singular sensory experiences, and the like. The various series of photographs (especially “Horizon series” – 2002) were particularly compelling to me. It was like watching a film, in that scenes were linked together in a logical, proportional way – but unlike a film, in that the scenes were not predictably placed. The mathematical beauty and nature’s patterns are discovered – or re-seen, I suppose. It’s not so much the artist as creative force, but as seeing creature. In any case, it made me so happy to wander around in these pieces today – experiencing light and natural forms in a bright new way.

This makes me wish I could have seen Eliasson’s “Weather project” (part of which is pictured below, as it appeared in the Tate Modern in 2003):

I’m almost always encouraged in this endeavor by reading Makoto Fujimura’s thoughts on art, culture and human flourishing – thoughts like this:

Art brings possibilities of re-creation back into the broken world. Artists are instinctively generative, and they are used to asking impossible questions. That’s why they are the first to enter dilapidated corners of the cities, and to see before anyone else, the potential for re-creation in an abandoned loft.

[Refractions 31]

May there no longer be physical space in which to experience an “outside” world unmediated by a technological interface? (at least, that’s what Jacques Ellul will argue in The Meaning of the City). Fujimura instead points to the genuine possibilities within an urban landscape that covers the nature beneath – possibilities driven by the enlivened imagination. There is an aspect of reclamation here, but more so, of recreation. Maybe the old reality is truly no longer with us – or maybe, and this might be harder, we no longer have the imaginative power to see life apart from the constructed shell. What artists like Fujimura seem to be saying is that, either way, we can still create something beautiful.