A PRUfect New Year’s Celebration
Read More
Dreamy, Healing Art at #PruBoston
News
Celebrated Cambridge artist invites public to see ‘giant blanket of possibility’ with series of suspended sculptures.
How do you combine bliss, joy, and healing into a piece of art? Enter the Prudential Center and look up to find out.
Suspended beneath the ceilings is Ambrosia, a stunning sculptural installation by award-winning Cambridge artist Cicely Carew, who hopes visitors will take a moment to stop and “be with the work”.
And, how could you not? Carew’s work seeks to transport Bostonians into a sanctuary of collective emotional and spiritual healing during these unusual times. It’s cerebral, yet rebellious. As you walk the light-filled thoroughfares of the Prudential Center, her painted, three-dimensional, mixed-media abstractions hover overhead, a dreamy cascade of color and light.
“During the winter months, we’re used to looking down and walking very quickly just one point to another,” Carew tells the Boston Globe. “I’m hoping [this installation] reminds people to look up, look to the light, and remember that we’re underneath this giant blanket of possibility.”
Radical joy
Commissioned by Boston Properties, which owns the Prudential Center, and curated by Now + There, a public art organization, Ambrosia opened on March 15, instantly lending Carew’s signature exuberant style to one of the city’s most beloved public spaces. The multi-piece installation is also a first for Carew, who earned her MFA at Lesley Art + Design in Cambridge, as she brings her work out from the canvas and fully into the third dimension.
Weighing in at 3.5 tons — crystals, tulle, beams, plexiglass, mylar, gold discs, and wire do add up! — Ambrosia brings “radical joy” when we need it most, just like the L.A.-born artist intended.
Take the Boylston Street entrance and find yourself bathing in light sifted through the first of Carew’s eight sculptures. The floral-inspired abstractions — they bring to mind fleeting, colorful clouds of flowers — span 2,000 square feet, each casting a different glow as the day goes by, shifting from turquoise, to magenta, to green. By the time you approach Huntington Avenue, you have experienced a multi-sensory, zero-gravity feast designed to warm the heart and soul.
“If I could cast a spell on everybody, that would be the thing… unity consciousness,” Carew tells WBUR. “You go into the space… and you feel that you are part of everything and everyone.”
Delight for the senses
Back in June, amid Covid-19 and racial reckoning, Carew set out to create her site-specific piece, using “joy” as her guiding light. The project was a bright spot, “a pile of glitter in a very dark space,” she says. And, although the word “ambrosia” traces its roots to Greek mythology, Carew built on the modern definition, “delight for the senses.”
“It’s an offering to life. It’s an offering to the creative spirit. It’s an offering and a celebration,” she says.
Kate Gilbert, executive director of Now + There, adds:
“At a time of societal upheaval, many of us are soul-searching. From the pandemic to racial reconciliation to political change, we are looking at public spaces and re-interpreting how we belong in them. Social distancing. Isolation. Togetherness. Disagreement. Acceptance. Cicely’s work will give us the time and space to contemplate our place in all of it.”
Come see Ambrosia for yourself. It’s your daily dose of discovery taken to a higher level.
Coming up:
Artist Talk
Thursday, March 25, 12 p.m.
See Ambrosia on social media and tag us @pruboston & #AmbrosiaBOS:
|
|
|