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Such Great Heights

Such Great Heights

Winter makes Chicagoans crave a sense of escape. An intriguing new exhibition of Maya Lin’s work at the Arts Club of Chicago provides a timely opportunity to visit, visually at least, some fascinating terrain. With its small and large-scale sculpture and installations, viewers can travel from mountain peaks to the bottom of the sea.

Chicago’s streetscape is flat, melding almost seamlessly with the shores of Lake Michigan. Lin’s work challenges the viewer to explore topography and geologic phenomena of greater depths and heights, pushing us to consider the natural environment far beyond our immediate surroundings. Through April 23, the public can view eleven of Lin’s works, including the room-filling Blue Lake Pass (2006)  and Flow (2009), the latter mimicking the undulation of wave swells. Much of the work is a continuation of the solo exhibition Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes that was organized by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA and traveled to several major museums. For the show at the Arts Club, Lin created a site-specific work, Reversing the Flow (2010), where the Chicago River is cast with straight pins in its two dimensional map shape. And at first glance, one might confuse the three-dimensional plywood model next to Flow as a sonar reading of Lake Michigan, when it is actually Caspian Sea (Bodies of Water series, 2006).

Maya Lin
The Arts Club of Chicago
201 E. Ontario Street
Monday – Friday, 11-6
Through April 23


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