Special Projects: Desert Curtain for the Scottsdale Arts Festival Sylvia Tidwell		Print This Page Email This Page

Description

Completed: March 10-15, 2000 during the Scottsdale Arts Festival in the Scottsdale Civic Center Sculpture Garden

Media: mesquite, palo verde, ragweed and brittle bush

Desert Curtain

With a desire to invigorate the relationship between ourselves with the environment artist, Sylvia Tidwell, caught festival goers attention and senses at the Scottsdale Arts Festival with her temporary installation Desert Curtain. Desert material extended from the tree branches to the ground creating a wall of textual desert material. Viewers confronted a larger than life size structure remnant of building walls suggesting a relationship between the natural and built environments inviting awareness of our surroundings.

Desert Curtain makes use of native desert materials such as mesquite, ragweed, palo verde, and brittle bush, re-contextualized among the greenery and fountains of the Scottsdale Civic Center Sculpture Garden. The understated form and earthen tones of Desert Curtain contrast with the vibrant hues and textures of the garden. The artwork serves as a quiet reminder of the original mystique of the Sonoran Desert.

• "In my current artwork, I use imagery based on my sense of energy flow and design in nature. The plant palette of soft tones in Desert Curtain literally, as well as symbolically, brings the desert into the oasis that is the Scottsdale Civic Center...and creates a complex mingling of manmade and natural, of lush urban life and the surrounding desert."--Sylvia Tidwell

Desert Curtain was produced in partnership with the valley-wide arts & environmental awareness project Sites Around the City: Art and the Environment.

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