Research Type
CuratorDate
2023Notes
Earth Door—a site-specific sculpture commissioned in 1965—is Jim Melchert’s ode to the Carneros landscape. It was created, according to Melchert, in the very place it now stands by “making a mould in the ground by digging it out, then filling it with concrete and setting the casting on end.”
The sculpture’s two faces each celebrate this unique patch of earth. “The cast side has deep grooves that rise, turn and descend,” Melchert explains, “repeating the pattern of the plowed vineyards across the road. Now of course, the field is full of grown vines so you no longer see the rhyme. My grooves nevertheless let you know how that land once looked. Things get recorded in concrete.”
Meanwhile, Melchert relates, “the painting on the reverse side alludes to a pre-historic underground chamber that had been discovered in Japan. On the walls were geometric designs done in red. I put one of them on the flat side of Earth Door to identify it with the mystery of things that happen in the ground.”
Melchert (b. 1930, New Bremen, Ohio) received degrees from Princeton and the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as studio assistant to Peter Voulkos and later taught for many years. He was director of the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 until 1981, and of the American Academy in Rome from 1984 to 1988. Among the places where his work has been exhibited are the Whitney Museum and Museum of Art and Design in New York; the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco, Tokyo and Kyoto; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany.