Fourteen artists and four O-scale model trains (1/48th size) a Trainscape do make. Catch this "Installation Art for Model Railroads" at DeCordova Museum near Boston before January 13, 2008. Go mid-afternoon on a Friday and you'll have the art collaboration nearly to yourself.
Or if you're on the other side of the planet, experience it in a way you can't do in person. Watch the movie and ride the trains through the twelve worlds that make up the exhibit: a caricature of the original railroad robber baron (Vanderbilt), an homage to nursing (Land O'Lactation), a small world of reflections, through the lighthead of Buddha, rustling a skyful of pink clouds...and seven more imaginative installations, including my predictable favorite: "Fourteenth Way "by sculptor Ralph Helmick.
Turns out "Ghostwriter," Helmick's piece to the right here, is not in this show but for quick blogging purposes, it's the only graphic I can find online that resembles his Fourteenth Way, the delicate shower of letters that he hangs in Trainscape. "The work references Wallace Stevens' poem 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,'" says the brochure. Helmick adds a line to the first three of the poem mentioning trains, thereby creating the landscape Stevens describes--simply by suspending individual letters (t, z, k e, a, etc) at varying distance from the ceiling. When the train runs through it, as it does all pieces in the show, the letter landscape moves.
And, though I don't know him, turns out that this artist lives just a mile from me and I've walked past his studio many times without realizing what was behind the door.
