NEW YORK, NY.- American artist Dan Graham (born 1942, Urbana, Illinois) has created a site-specific installation atop The Metropolitan Museum of Art ’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden—the second in a new series of commissions for the outdoor site. Comprising curves of steel and two-way mirrored glass between ivy hedgerows, Graham’s structure is part garden maze, part modernist skyscraper façade. Set within a specially engineered terrain designed in collaboration with the Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt (born 1957, Balzers, Liechtenstein), the work—titled Hedge Two-Way Mirror Walkabout—is both transparent and reflective, creating a changing and visually complex environment for visitors. The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham with Günther Vogt is on view from April 29 through November 2, 2014 (weather permitting).

“We are thrilled to present this extraordinary new commission,” stated Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum. “For decades, Dan Graham has created work that challenges viewers to think in new and thought-provoking ways about the streets and cities they traverse every day. In his reimagining of the Met’s roof, visitors will discover a picturesque landscape that is at once unexpected and familiar.”

“What Dan creates is a new form of quixotic landscape architecture that combines nature and community within a city environment,” said Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art. “It is work that draws paradoxically on formal 18th-century Northern European gardens, while also referencing the glossy sleekness of corporate skyscrapers and the American suburban vernacular.”

For the past 50 years Graham has engaged his interest in architecture and the way it structures public space through a multidisciplinary practice that includes writing, photography, video, performance, and—beginning in the 1970s—sculptural environments of mirrored glass and metal. He calls these hybrid structures “pavilions” after the ornamental buildings that decorate 17th- and 18th-century formal gardens—architectural fantasies inspired by the ruins of classical antiquity.

Graham’s pavilions similarly invite romance or play, but their forms and materials have a more contemporary source: the gleaming glass facades of modern office towers. For the artist, the mirrored cladding of a corporate headquarters symbolizes economic power and sleek efficiency; it also provides a certain camouflage, reflecting the world around it as it shields what happens inside from prying eyes.

With this signature material, Graham’s pavilions also transform observers of the work into performers within it, and, through the sight of their own reflections, make them acutely aware of their own viewership.

The artist’s pavilions likewise respond to their specific sites. The Museum’s Roof Garden, where the idyllic expanse of Central Park confronts the tall buildings of midtown Manhattan, is both of the city and at a certain remove from it. The evergreen plantings that edge the parapets also reminded Graham of the shrubbery that often demarcates private property lines in the New Jersey suburbs of his youth. Graham’s collaboration with Günther Vogt further illuminates the site’s multilayered references—historic gardens, public parks, contemporary corporate architecture, and the suburban lawn—as its pavilion engages the viewer in a historic and complex mirror-play.