Rolling hills and soft green grass evoke memories of warm days of playing outside and exploring. It’s not the thing you’d typically think of when you think of something you might find in an art gallery.
However, in Oslo, Norway’s Noplace gallery, that’s exactly what visitors found–a little piece of the outdoors indoors. The piece, called, Not Red But Green by artist Per Kristian Nygård, was created by installing soil into the entire gallery space. At the back, it nearly reached the ceiling, and continued through the room in peaks and valleys, until it spilled out the door in a gentle slope of grass and earth. While it certainly looks like something everyone would want to run around in, exploration by visitors was prohibited.
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The piece, on the surface, is a whimsical, surreal landscape that challenges perceptions of “inside” and “outside,” and could even be seen as a joke about humans’ tendencies to want to keep dirt outside. However, another interpretation could be based on the interaction of the “natural” space of the indoor lawn (which, of course, is anything but natural) and the rigid structure of the gallery. When exploring, visitors would be abruptly stopped by the walls and ceiling, and might speak to the shrinking natural world as human development closes in, leaving us less natural space. Or, more optimistically, maybe it’s about the way nature, despite all odds, conquers all and reclaims human-made items. Whatever your interpretation, though, the result, for the time the installation was open, was a strangely magical one.
Via My Modern Met
