RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- A monumental interactive tree swing is the focal point of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s presentation of the work of Virginia Overton as part of Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place. The exhibition, which is on view through February 5, 2017, presents Overton’s newly commissioned sculptures within the galleries, on the surrounding campus, and atop the Museum’s roof. Suspended on a free-standing steel armature, the swing is comprised of the approximately 12-foot-long debarked trunk of a felled eastern white pine tree from the Museum’s grounds. Other sculptural works were fabricated on-site during the installation period, incorporating elements harvested from the tree as well as items found around the Museum property and neighboring community. Perched on the Museum’s signature pitched roofline, which emulates the historic Colonial homes lining Main Street, is a newly commissioned weather vane, part of an ongoing series initiated by Overton in 2013.

Curator Amy Smith-Stewart describes Overton’s process, “Whether reflecting the architectural features of a gallery or the contours of a natural landscape, Overton physically wrangles her material—studying and learning its physical properties, seeing how far it can go, how much it can withstand—as it is processed through countless hours of experimentation. Once installed, her space-shifting sculptures and installations produce shadows, light leaks, and sound echoes that, through a process of re- articulation, demonstrate the inherent beingness of an object, its materiality, its connection to a specific place at a particular time, inviting the viewer to navigate it anew.” Overton (born 1971, Nashville, Tennessee) utilizes sculpture, installation, and photography to relate to and interact with a venue’s architecture and defining landscape. Her sculptures and interventions are made up of indigenous readymade objects and materials Overton scavenges from within the surrounding community. Growing up in the rural south on a Tennessee farm, Overton’s innate sensitivity to the land, and its inherent economic value, has instilled in her an intuitive understanding of the energetic potential to be harnessed and reaped from both her materials and her environment.

Virginia Overton is part of Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place, which opened with a public reception on May 1, 2106. This series of exhibitions also features David Brooks, Kim Jones, and Peter Liversidge, presenting site-specific commissions, ranging from sculpture to drawing and performance-based works. The exhibitions encompass both the monumental and the ephemeral, intersecting, interconnecting, or mirroring the Museum’s galleries and two-acre Sculpture Garden, as well as the surrounding community. The artists utilize materials found on or indigenous to the grounds and the area, offering a response to “site” that underscores the institution’s material history and its visual condition by transforming scale and circumstance. The works seek to “frame” the view within and beyond of the galleries against the natural landscape while also accentuating the Museum’s unique architectural features, such as a pitched roofline, paned windows, and a room-scale camera obscura. Viewers are able to respond to works from multiple vantage points as they move around the Museum’s galleries, grounds, and the surrounding environs. Gravel Mirror (1968), a work by the influential artist and writer Robert Smithson, incorporated gravel found on the grounds of The Aldrich, and was a significant touchstone for the development of this exhibition series.

Overton was born in Nashville, Tennessee and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami in 2014, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville in 2014, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster in 2013-14, Kunsthalle Bern in 2013, The Power Station, Dallas in 2013, and The Kitchen, New York in 2012.