Eden 2.0

Alexi Antoniadis creates a large-scale outdoor sculpture to help us mark the 175th anniversary of the Fruitlands Utopian Commune that took place on this site. Antoniadis uses hand-formed steel and will color it with paint. The mesmerizing contours are informed in part by the sleek, non-representational forms of 20th-century modernism, yet with a balance of line and space that is very much of the present. The sleek lines provide a magnetic source of curiosity and new sightlines through which visitors may view the landscape.

Antoniadis works with themes of utopia and creates site-specific work responding to the Fruitlands experiment of 1843, including the high-reaching expectations, the ultimately disappointing outcome, and the structure of the house itself. The sculpture will have an open-air outline, or “ghost,” of the house that people could walk around and through. While loosely echoing the forms of the Fruitlands farmhouse, the sculpture will join structure and idea in metaphor, completing the past while casting it through a contemporary lens to reform or reject it, based on the viewpoint of each person experiencing it.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.