Within Teardrop Park’s winding paths, up the hillside slopes, under tree canopies and near play areas, visitors encounter subtle and powerful art by Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil. Integrated into the surface of the landscape are four dramatic rock formations, Geologic Sections, that were composed by the artists “to reveal something larger than what is human.”
Geologic Sections defies traditional expectations of public art statues or autonomous sculpture. Instead, the bluestone rock outcroppings refer to the Earth’s constant internal activity and rhythmic forces and thrust upward to activate the man-made park. A paradox of Geologic Sections is that they give visitors a sense of nature’s wilderness and powerful, slow motion, but they were conceived of and made tangible through artists’ imaginations and vision for an unusually engaging urban landscape.
In the artists’ words, “while the Hudson River Valley provides the landscape we draw upon, our organizing structure develops not from any image of the valley, but from the geologic processes that shape and form it.”
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