Paula Hayes

"Aquarium" 2011, via Lever House Photography: Jesse David Harris

Paula Hayes has turned the lobby of Lever House at Park Avenue and 53rd Street into an aquatic jungle with her new installation Land Mind. The centerpiece is a large womb-like saltwater aquarium atop a wooden platform that houses clownfish, starfish, shrimp, snails, and corals, among others. A water filtration tube snakes out of the orb like an umbilical cord into the surrounding island of tropical perennial plants, all bordered by a metallic silver braid. Complete with full-spectrum lighting, it is an entire balanced ecosystem. A glowing wall-mounted cocoon stretches 15 feet and holds water-retaining succulent plants, rocks, and sea glass. Tropical trees in custom dumpling-shaped rubber planters are scattered about the space. "The rigor of creating the planting vehicles strengthens the message that the interior landscape is to be taken very seriously and cared for with precision." To communicate this message is her ultimate goal, Hayes says.

Hayes crafts the magical world in round, protective, maternal shapes. By designing an environment that contains self-sustaining ecosystems as well as elements that require human nurturing (feeding fish and watering potted plants), Hayes has orchestrated an interactive event that beautifully (and literally) illustrates the possibility of ecological balance in the 21st century.

Land Mind is now on view at Lever House in midtown through January 27th.

David LaChapelle: From Darkness to Light

"Adam & Eve" installation view via David LaChapelle

In From Darkness to Light, David LaChapelle hopes to “resuscitate the figure from its current state of commodity.” The photographer and director actually began his artistic career in galleries before Andy Warhol launched him into fame with a job at Interview Magazine. Like Warhol, LaChapelle playfully splashes in both commercial and conceptual puddles to stir together a highly distinctive concoction.

At the Lever House lobby, LaChapelle takes his primary medium of photography back to kindergarten art class with paper chains, collage, and stickers. In “Chain of Life,” LaChapelle replaces construction paper with photographs of the human form, stapled together into swooping and cascading strings that create a celebratory visual of human connectedness. In “Raft of Illusion, Raging Toward Truth,” he combines watercolor, pencil, paper, and glossy prints of his own staged photographs and mounts them on varying numbers of cardboard layers to create a 3D take on French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa. Epic in both size and subject, the ceiling-high collage of cut outs and art class materials showcases LaChapelle’s eye for the surreal. In “Adam & Eve” he arranges tinted translucent stickers of nudes into two circles (separated by sex) on the glass walls of the lobby. The forms swim around each other in a distinctly cell-like mosaic that create an effect of a church’s stained glass window through a microscope, conjuring at once images of science and religion. LaChapelle’s vision of interconnectedness and enlightenment through a youthful lens makes for a compelling experience.

From Darkness to Light is now on view at Lever House in midtown through September 30th.