This Enormous Installation Will Turn Eden Park Into A Living, Breathing Artwork In November
Molly Codyre
New Zealand Editor | Urban List
How, exactly, do we define art? There's the paintings on your walls, the sculptures in your gardens, and the ceramics on your side tables. But if we expand our scope, art exists in the every day facets of our lives; our clothes, our furniture, our makeup and even the natural world we're surrounded by. It's the latter that is the source of inspiration for Kiwi artist Jesse Woolston's new exhibition, The Infinite Constant Front, which will take over Eden Park as part of Art in the Park from 12-15 November.
Los Angeles-based, Lower Hutt-born Woolston has gained global acclaim for his life-size, immersive digital artworks. He's partnered with Dior on floral pieces that were projected on the front of their stores around the world, created a piece for Leonardo DiCaprio's charity Re-Wild, and shown at acclaimed art show Frieze London.
Image Credit: Supplied | Art in the Park
The idea at the centre of all of his works is the tension between nature and chaos; creating simulations of nature at its most powerful and extreme and showing them in large, civil-scale installations that bring you close to the side of nature humans are often taught to run from. In essence, his work brings you face to face with some of our world's scariest elements.
The Infinite Constant Front marks the first time Woolston has exhibited in his home country, and the first time in history a piece of this scale has transformed a national stadium into an immersive artwork through visual and auditory arts.
Image Credit: Supplied | Art in the Park
It's fitting, then, that this work draws inspiration from Aotearoa and Woolston's upbringing between Lower Hutt and Auckland, often spending time in nature. Rather than depicting the country's landscapes in their physical state, the work displays the rawness of nature at its most ephemeral, with a focus on the idea of nature as behaviour rather than an image, and its constant state of transformation.
"After more than a decade presenting work internationally, bringing those ideas home at this scale for the first time is deeply significant to who I am, where my work began, and what this opportunity means to me," explains Woolston.
Doing this at New Zealand's national stadium feels particularly pertinent; especially as each piece is designed to mimic the size and scale of the stadium's goal posts, a key part of the many, many rugby games played in this stadium, a time when the country stops and unites to support the All Blacks. It feels suitably metaphoric of what this piece of work means: a homecoming, and the first showing of a piece that will take the power of New Zealand to the world.
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