A giant mirrored hot air balloon will reflect the Massachusetts landscape.
The Trustees of Reservations
With his new traveling art installation Doug Aitken, the California-based multimedia artist and filmmaker, sets sail into the skies over Massachusetts in a 100-foot tall, mirrored hot air balloon. As Shakespeare said, he holds, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.
“It’s a road trip to the sky,” says Aitken, who has designed the audacious project with the Trustees for Reservations, the Massachusetts non-profit that, since 1891, has preserved parks, gardens, farms, beaches and historic homes in the state. “New Horizon,” Doug Aitken’s Trustees-sponsored art installation, will travel from one Trustees property to another throughout the month of July. The enormous mirrored balloon will reflect the landscape, city streets, even rush hour traffic, and create ‘happenings’ wherever it goes.
“The road trip is one of America’s great mythologies,” the artist says.
“I’m not interested in formal sculpture on a lawn,” says Pedro Alonzo, Guest Curator of Art and The Landscape for the Trustees. “The balloon is a beacon. It brings people together. We want to bring people together.”
The planned route begins the weekend of July 12 to 14 on Martha’s Vineyard, travels to the mainland and to the North Shore, visits Boston and, by the end of the month, flies across the state to the Berkshires. A lot of flexibility is built into the schedule to allow for unplanned visits, events, or capricious New England weather.
“I’m curious and interested to see what happens,” Aitken says. “With public involvement, the events with the most indelible impression are unexpected.”
He hopes that musicians will fill the air with tunes as the balloon floats over the landscape. When tethered at various Trustees locations, Aitken expects that it will become the centerpiece of artistic and creative events.
“Art is greater than the physical,” he says.
Shakespeare, Goethe and Alice in Wonderland, all devotees of the mirror, would agree.