Joe Scanlan
Spring Line
Spring Line is a piece shown for the first time in his solo exhibition at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne in 2007. It pays homage to the work of the famous conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who had died on 8 April that year. Scanlan aims to guide the spectator to gage the level of influence Sol LeWitt has had on his work with regards the conversion of potential ideas into sculpture. Forsythia stems, a theme in his work of the last 7 years, are seen as concrete drawings where each stem is a line in space and each flower a mark. Taking the concept of Sol LeWitt’s instructions in which the artwork exists first as an idea before realization, Spring Line applies the same principle by which an artwork exists first of all as a mobile box prior to installation. The way in which the drawings are exhibited in space can vary: in Villeurbanne they were dispersed, during the Armory Show the stems all stayed in the box, in Amsterdam only 5 drawings were created, the other stems stayed in the box. Thus Spring Line is a variable image which is adaptable to any space and reinvented each time. The forsythia motif resonates with this idea, since it is a flower that renews itself constantly in the cycle of seasons – eternal and forever new.