Jim Denevan
The Artwork of Jim Denevan
January 20, 2010 – April 20, 2010
Visitor Information
This exhibition is now closed.
There is no admission fee to visit The Gallery at Windsor. Exhibition visitors are invited to support The Windsor Charitable Foundation with a suggested donation of $10. This gift is tax-deductible and is designated to support local arts education.
About the Exhibition
Jim Denevan is an artist who creates ethereal sand drawings. He creates large-scale sand drawings along the coasts of California and the Dry Lake Beds of Nevada. From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places – places to be in and explore, challenging our relationship within the environment. For a time, the drawing is a place that exists in the indeterminate space of these vast landscapes.
The Artwork of Jim Denevan, on display at The Gallery at Windsor in 2010, examined the world’s largest single work of art, which Denevan created in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada in May 2009. Based on a mathematical theorem called an Apollonian gasket, the design is set around triples of circles at tangents to others. The drawing took 15 days, was three miles wide and has an overall circumference of nine miles. The largest lines etched into the sand are 28 feet wide and almost three feet deep in places. Stunning aerial, satellite and detailed monochromatic photographs of this drawing were hung in the Gallery allowing viewers to experience the large-scale ephemeral image.
About the Artist
Jim Denevan is based in Santa Cruz, California. The artist creates temporary drawings on sand, earth and ice that are eventually erased by waves and weather. These drawings range in scale from smaller beach compositions to large scale land works the size of a city. Denevan’s artwork is performed primarily outside in California but also in many other locations around the world.
Denevan’s work has been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; MoMA/PS1, New York, NY; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Highlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA and Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, among others.
In addition to drawing in sand and on desert surfaces, Denevan is a chef, celebrating food at the source with his organization, Outstanding in the Field. Outstanding in the Field is a worldwide moveable feast, a seasonal open-air investigation into the quality and meaning of a place.