Emerald City
Just nine months after he created 30 shipping containers for an interactive outdoor exhibit at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, art professor Kelly Goff has produced another large-scale exhibit for residents and visitors to Boston.
“Emerald City,” a multi-media sculpture and video installation that “explores our relationship with natural and synthetic habitats,” is on view now through July 17 at the Boston Children’s Museum gallery, according to the museum website.
According to the description: “Goff presents three unique, life-sized tree forms, including a 6-foot hollow log constructed from thousands of individual pieces of scrap wood, three facsimiles of a large tree stump cast in concrete, and a suspended, 25-foot paper cast of a fallen cedar tree. Within these forms exist light, projected imagery, and a live video feed.”
Goff, assistant professor of art and art history at Wheaton, told the museum that each sculpture in the exhibit had been quality tested by his six-year-old.
“In conceiving this exhibition for Boston Children’s Museum, I was excited by the task of creating new work that could both engage the sense of wonder I admire so much in children while challenging families to consider our place in the natural world,” he said.
Last summer, Goff worked with two student interns to create 30 soft foam shipping containers ranging from 2 1/2 to 5 feet in length for an outdoor exhibit at the convention center’s D Street ArtLAB. The pieces were designed to be waterproof and durable, with a hard Styrofoam core that allowed visitors to stack, pile and climb on them.
The project was inspired by the artist’s time growing up on the island of Curaçao, near one of the largest dry docks in the Caribbean.