PLOT is a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time.

Judi Werthein

To create La Tierra de los Libres, Judi Werthein chose to collaborate with itinerant agricultural workers from Colombia's Pacific Coast who were driven to inland cities by conflict surrounding the drug trade. To make a living in their new, urban environment, this group drew on a cultural tradition of singing while they worked and began performing in local restaurants and bars. Werthein gave the musicians a literal Spanish translation of The Star-Spangled Banner and asked them to play the song in their own style.

PLOT is a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time. This World & Nearer Ones is the first edition of PLOT, and will be held this summer on Governors Island. 19 artworks by international contemporary artists will be presented. The exhibition is free and open to the public Friday-Sunday.

Featuring work by Edgar Arceneaux, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Adam Chodzko, Tue Greenfort, Jill Magid, Teresa Margolles, Anthony McCall, Nils Norman, Susan Philipsz, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith, Tercerunquinto, Tris Vonna-Michell, Mark Wallinger, Klaus Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Judi Werthein, Guido van der Werve, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Curated by Mark Beasley.

Curatorial Statement (Excerpt)
It could be stated that many of the works of This World & Nearer Ones seem enveloped in a pall of darkness, to be read either as a persistence of the irrational and the obscure or a reflection of the spirit of the age. It was the Impressionists that chose to employ dark mirrors, in order to refresh their eyes and see color anew; to stare into dark glass before turning back again to the world. This, then, is the exhibition as dark mirror. It seeks, through materially slight and ephemeral means, to present works that eschew the spectacular and absolute and, employing more than a little dark humour, invite open speculation. Avoiding easy succour—there is no vividly coloured, lime green, depression-era glass by which to forget oneself—the artists present a world in which certainty and the future are in question. For certainty without critical thought has been the crowning tragedy of the age. What we are being asked to consider is the sureness of our beliefs, from the invocation of spirits both scientific and ritually summoned; fictional architecture and neo-liberal urban planning; the ghosts of counterculture and culturally-sanctioned agit-prop to the spoken testimony of army veterans and science fiction narratives. It, as with the island, is in a state of becoming, caught between worlds and open to all, a moment to consider without fixity the times in which we live.
Mark Beasley, May, 2009
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2009/plot09/artworks.php