by erika rench
John Maher, a fine arts photographer, walks around to the side of his house at Rowena Dell, Oregon, and points to his newest artwork. There, standing among pine trees, on a bed of needles, is a ladder painted the color of a sunflower. The 18-foot fruit picker’s ladder is out of place here in the wooden glen, so just imagine what 100 of them will look like perched on the hills along Interstate 84. The “Running Ladders” project, set to debut in 2011, is Maher’s first large-scale conceptual art installation, but for thirty years he has challenged his art to question its role in society. “Art is an elevated experience, it should engage people,” Maher says. “If you can take the mundane and show it to be as special as it really is, that’s art’s job.”
Take an everyday farm tool like a ladder out of its environment—its context—and add the right colors to it and, “You create a new context for it and raise people’s awareness of that object,” says Maher. The “Running Ladders” project is a tribute to small farms and an opportunity, through art, to bring relevance to their vital role in our society. For Maher, there is nostalgia in what small farms represent, and he sees a desire for our culture to reconnect with these farms, “to get our hands in the dirt again,” as he puts it. His sentiments go back to the 1960s and the back-to-the-land movement, but Maher believes this new push for creating sustainable communities is much bigger than that. “Farming is a big part of the landscape in Oregon,” he says. “What happens to farms happens to the environment.”
The idea of placing painted ladders along the interstate actually came from another common object seen across Oregon’s landscape: fences. Inspired by the conceptual artist, Christo, who in the 1970s did a project using fabric to create miles of white fence in California, Maher’s “Running Ladders” was conceived on a typical drive home along the scenic highway from Mosier, Oregon. “I had a transformative moment and I want to communicate that to others, many others,” Maher says…
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Tags: art, farming, interstate, john maher, landscape, running ladders
