The Albuquerque Bosque's trash is an artist's treasure.
Joshua Willis, the Open Space Visitor Center coordinator, helped find artists for Land/Art New Mexico, a collaboration with 516 Arts to showcase local artists who create land-based art.
Willis said most of the exhibits will be finished by June 1, but some are still being constructed. The grand opening for Land/Art New Mexico is June 21, the summer solstice.
Willis said he received entries from all over the world because this is one of the first projects of its kind happening in New Mexico.
"I ended up going primarily with local artists because they are more in tune with this environment," Willis said. "We created some criteria for showing on Open Space property. Because we're a giant bureaucracy, there are some stringent rules when dealing with open space because it is land that everybody holds sacred."
The materials artists were allowed to use had to be found in the Bosque, such as tree stumps and branches.
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Benjamin Forgey, who makes furniture in Albuquerque, is building an arboreal dome with dead cottonwood branches.
"I build furniture normally out of drift wood that I find at Cochiti," he said. "With this piece I have been moving more towards art. I am bridging the gap between craft and art, and then art and architecture."
Forgey said the idea for his dome came to him when he was walking around the Bosque last winter.
"I was trying to pick a site that would work and then design something for that site," he said. "At first I didn't want to build out here. I wanted to build in the forest so that I would have a dome, and then the trees would make a dome and then the sky above would be a dome."
Forgey said the site where he is constructing the dome was still able to capture his idea of multiple domes.
"I want people to look up through it, and in the summer you would see the leaves and the limbs, and in fall the leaves are yellow, and in the winter they are brown, and in the spring the cottonwood loses its leaves," he said. "So every time you came back it would make you notice the changing of the seasons and really notice what is around you a little more."
Willis said some artists were also excited to use some of the more exotic materials found in the Bosque.
"There are also the jetty jacks," Willis said. "They are very unique relics from the past and were actually a war-time technology that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to stop tanks from crossing lines."
Jetty jacks are 15-foot tall steel structures that have four rods extending from the center in a star-like shape.
"They were re-conceptualized in a way to wage war on rivers before there were dams on the Rio Grande," Willis said. "Once the dams came along, they made the jetty jacks obsolete. So basically what you have is an antiquated technology that is just sitting in the Bosque, and it is massive in its scale."
Willis said the exhibits using jetty jacks might change the way people feel about the steel structures.
"People have mixed opinions about them," he said. "They think they should be removed sometimes, and other times people like them. A lot of the artists chose to use the jetty jacks. All the artists were unique in their approach of how to use them."
Land/Art New Mexico
Exhibit opens June 1
Open Space Visitor Center, 6500 Coors Blvd N.W.
Open Tuesday - Sunday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
