Pierscape at Navy Pier Phase II Design Team Organization + ...

Lisa D. Freiman
Whole, Oly Genger
Indianapolis Museum of Art
55
Known for transforming common nylon climbing rope into elaborate monumental
sculptures, New York-based artist Orly Genger has created Whole, a unique
site-specific installation, in response to the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion at
the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). Gengers project for the IMA is her largest
and most ambitious to date, incorporating thousands of feet of rope, which she handknots,
paints and stacks, creating immense sculptures that confront the viewer.
Looped and knotted by hand, Whole evokes the normally intimate processes
of knitting and crocheting, yet expands them to a newly epic scale. Gengers work
challenges typical associations with craft and textile through its intensely
physical creation process, in which the artist wrestles rope into knots and amasses
it into powerful sculptural objects. The resulting works are intended to provoke
a visceral physical response from viewers, challenging them to reconsider their
relationship to the normally unobstructed space around them and forcing them to
navigate the space in new ways. Comprised of nine different sculptures, Whole
is impossible to fully grasp from a single viewpoint, and in its interplay between its
fragmented parts calls into question the nature of wholeness itself.