Meters to the Center by sculptor Laura Kaufman was selected to be a part of FLOW.12 on Randall’s Island through September 2012.

Where: FLOW.12 @ Randall’s Island Exhibition Website: http://www.flow12.org/artists/laura-kaufman /

Artist Website: http://www.laurakaufmanstudio.com/

About Meters to the Center:

Meters To The Center for FLOW.12 is a site-specific sculpture that will reflect on the monumental dimensions of our solar system by relating them to the scale of the Robert F Kennedy Bridge. The bridge is an engineered object of such magnitude that its numbers–of cars, of cubic feet, and even of miles of subroads–elevate it beyond it a human scale. The contradiction of its presence on Randall’s Island is that while the three-pronged structure looms, the island is a refuge where New Yorkers can experience expansive space and a connection to the sky and even the planet. Meters To The Center is a bench-height sculpture in three parts whose shape mimics the shape and orientation of the bridge when viewed from a satellite. Each arm of the three-pronged sculpture will be composed of numbers cast in colored concrete compound. These three numbers are the approximate distances in meters from the surface of the island to centers of the earth, moon, and sun. The scales of these celestial bodies and the big numbers that represent them dwarf the measurements of our daily existence. The bridge’s monumentality spans not only the commute between the boroughs but also the elastic distances our eyes and minds travel between the earth and the sky. Each arm of the sculpture has a unique concrete compound that includes material from the center of the three boroughs connected by the bridge—the ‘earth’ arm has organic material from the center of Manhattan, the ‘moon’ from the Bronx, and the ‘sun’ from Queens.

About FLOW.12: The Randall’s Island Park Alliance (formerly the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation), the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Made Event are pleased to present FLOW.12, the second installment of a two-part environmental art exhibition on view during the summers of 2011 and 2012 along the shoreline at Randall’s Island Park. The project is aimed at fostering appreciation of the shoreline through artistic expression, while calling visitors to interact with and care for the Park’s island environment. FLOW features ten site-specific art projects, five each summer, by participants in the Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists. FLOW has been made possible through a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund (CIF) and through support from Made Event, proud producers of The Electric Zoo Festival, NYC’s largest electronic dance music festival, held annually at Randall’s Island Park. The FLOW exhibitions express the confluence of art, music and environment at Randall’s Island Park, in the midst of one of the world’s greatest cities.

About the Artist:

Laura Kaufman has exhibited in New York, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington. This June she will be included in an exhibition at Field Projects Gallery in Chelsea. She was a 2011 participant in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program and exhibited in the first AIM Biennial in 2011. Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh and raised in the suburbs of Chicago and Houston. After earning her B.A. from Vassar College, she received the Weitzel-Barber Art Travel Prize, which afforded her the opportunity to photograph the temples and gardens of Kyoto. After then going on to live and teach in northern Japan, Kaufman returned to the U.S. to pursue her M.F.A. in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was awarded the Sitings Installation at RISD Museum. Kaufman lives in Cold Spring, NY.

Kaufman wishes to thank the Randall’s Island Park Alliance, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Made Event, and Michael Karmody of Stone Soup Concrete in Easthampton, MA.

For additional information contact:

Leah Oates at [email protected]/917.698.2012