Arctic Wave: Big Breakwater

Tamara Drewe

A small portion of Christopher Haun's piece on display

By Catherine Wagley

Despite its multiple food courts, army of tables, and on-site pianist, Fig+7 is a place for people on the move.

So when curator Janet Levy proposed a series of artists' projects for the Brookfield-run shopping center, she was searching for something that would compel the attention of an audience of Downtown professionals dashing to the gym or to a quick, mid-day lunch date. She needed to capture their attention without actually making them stop. What she came up with was Mind Frames, a series of sprawling window images that turn commercial sleekness into complete quiet, almost tricking passers-by into engageing in a moment of stillness. The first artist in the series, Lesley Moon, created a shimmering golden curtain called The Golden Veil (Et In Arcadia). Its length (it spans the equivalent of approximately three storefronts) and flattened layers make it an uncanny interruption to the surrounding sea of retailers. When Levy saw a man run his hand across the curtain to see if it was real, she felt Mind Frames was already a success.

The second project in the series, more dramatically titled Arctic Wave: Big Breakwater, stills one of nature's most impressive movements. The work of Los Angeles-based Christopher Haun, Big Breakwater imprisons images of swelling waves in geometric mosaic frames. Interested in the unnerving ways in which pop culture and virtual realities pull us from nature, Haun uses the language and media of pop and virtual imagery to grapple with nature. This time, he's stopped nature dead. Usually in perpetual motion, an inexhaustible symbol of the world's self-sustenance, water freezes and even becomes stylized in Haun's digitally fabricated mosaic. Images of waves turn on their side, jut up against each other, and stack together, making a staccato, calculated mountain of blue fragments. This sort of standstill turns nature into something totally unnatural. But it doesn't have to be ominous. Paradoxically, making serenity extreme may be the best way to compel people to embrace it.

"The message is tranquility, calm, and stillness," explains Haun. "Giving the earth a break, to breathe and be itself, giving ourselves a moment to pause and reflect." Few places are less suited for pause and reflection than the curved walkway on the second landing of Fig+7, but that makes it ideal. Haun's work thrives on contradiction.

Arctic Wave: Big Breakwater opens with a reception on November 11, 2010.

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