Cadman Plaza Park

Leonard Ursachi’s Well In Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn

IMMEDIATE
Thursday, October 20, 2011
No. 80
http://www.nyc.gov/parks

Parks & Recreation is pleased to announce the opening of Leonard Ursachi’s exhibition Well in bustling downtown Brooklyn at Cadman Plaza Park. Located on the lawn near the eastern entrance at Red Cross Place, the sculpture will be on view from October 29, 2011, through April 30, 2012. There will be an opening on site from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on October 29. Ursachi’s sculpture, with its wellhead, lever and bucket, is suggestive of a traditional rural well.

“The well is a shared resource and gathering place. Its iconography is mythic—the source from which life and knowledge spring; a receptacle for our dreams and desires. I’m interested in the significance of the well today,” states Ursachi. “There are still communities that depend on wells, the health of which is affected by conditions that originate both locally and across the globe—pollution, industrial waste, climate change, wars.”

For the wellhead, Ursachi cast blocks in transparent, water-blue acrylic with embedded crushed, empty plastic water bottles. He created the mold for the blocks from an antique cobblestone salvaged from a Brooklyn street when it was being torn up. The bottom surface of the wellhead is mirrored and like a traditional well, viewers will see their own reflections when they peer into the opening. Ursachi made the wellhead’s base, bucket, and lever from wood he salvaged from the East River, a block from his DUMBO studio.

Ursachi was born in Romania, which he left in 1980. He has exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition in 2008 at MNAC, Romania’s National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has called Ursachi’s work “thought provoking and quite moving . . . dealing with an important aspect of our culture and . . . both sensitive and intelligent.” He has exhibited temporary public art in Prospect Park, Brooklyn; Duarte Square, Manhattan; and Beach Street Park, Manhattan.

Parks’ public art program has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art in parks throughout the five boroughs. Since 1967, collaborations with arts organizations and artists have produced hundreds of public art projects in New York City parks.

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