Synergy
Description: Marble, steel, plant material – 1999
Artist: David Barr, (1939 - 2015), Novi, MI
Location: East side of Dennos Museum Center, Main Campus
About the Sculpture
David Barr feels that art transcends and connects people, instead of dividing them. Understanding that art and culture are inextricably tied together and always have been, Barr poetically manifests this relationship in his art. Such evidence is found in this sculpture, Synergy, where Barr has created an environment woven of three elements; stone, steel and plant material. The artist explains that the sculpture expresses the drama of natural and human design collisions and resolutions. A logarithmic stone spiral path (one of nature's most basic and harmonious form), aligned by roughly-cut quarry stone boulders (polished on one side), is intersected by painted steel plates. This sculpture is governed by mathematical principles or arithmetic progressions, and is synergistically aligned with solar and lunar rotations. Man confronts nature, challenging but not disturbing its balance. Synergy is a space to wander through and explore altering spatial relationships.
About the Artist
Barr’s sculptures covertly bear witness to his travels. The egg-shaped stone from the Easter Island shore became an inspiration for his marble sculptures. On the issue of color, he realized that the exclusion of color, for its entire programmatic rigor, was restrictive, arbitrary, and impoverishing. Most fundamentally, a rejection of the full spectrum is a negation of nature and life itself.
