Suzanne Wheeling
Exhibition Project:
High Seas Table, 2000, after 1980
(steel, wood, acrylics, laminations)
On the meadow (once a tennis court) behind the Barn Studio, Suzanne Wheeling's new version of a twenty-year old piece rose up like a long, flat-roofed pavilion, supported by thin metal legs. Seen from above, at the higher level of the Barn Studio, the watery blue pattern of its tabletops could be discerned. Up close, they rose high enough to shelter viewers from the June sun, their undersides marked with images of distinguishing life from the world's different oceans. In the shade of the tabletops, viewers could also pick up laminated pages lying on the ground, describing specific environmental issues for the world's largest bodies of water. This piece differed markedly from its 1980 original, while sharing that work's theme and structure. The original High Seas Table was sited indoors, taking up most of a gallery room, and rising to about chest-height, to thrust viewers in close to its water-patterned surface. Wheeling set herself the challenge of making the new piece work outdoors, where it would sit in open space, engaging with the scale of an open meadow, and interacting with the natural elements of grass, trees, sky and water (though not visible, the Pickering Creek and springs were close by). At its new height, and with its more explicit subject matter, it immersed its audience in a different way.
Suzanne Wheeling's large-scale site-specific installations, created over the last two decades,
engage her viewers in speculation on such concepts as the flow of water, the mythic aspects of
shelter, and the subatomic flow underlying the physical world. Her works incorporate a range
of materials from metal, wood, cloth and foam, to painting and drawing, to video and
photography. A founding member of Nexus Gallery, she has shown there nine times since 1979,
and has participated in exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto and
other cities. She has also made art sited in such non-traditional sites as a Schuylkill
riverbank, an abandoned railroad dock, a storefront in Grand Central Station, and in the
woods outside Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.