Sweet Pass Sculpture Park

The Texas Blackland Prairie—the ecoregion where Dallas is located—is the most endangered large ecosystem in North America (currently, less than 1% remains). Sweet Pass Sculpture School artists conducted a broad survey of this lost prairie, exploring remnant parcels in the Clymer Meadow and Frankford Church and the manufactured prairie of the GW Bush library. They examined how Dallas' construction has shaped its surrounding ecology and how the city and natures incorporation into its tangled mass. The works presented respond to this contemporary environment, ranging from self-contained sculptural objects to landscape interventions and movement-based performance video.

In prairie landscapes, bottomlands appear as depressions in the earth, sunken and soggy places sitting at a river's edge. The artists in Sculpture School found home in that metaphor, sinking their toes into the mire of the overlooked, unseen, and unloved. Physically and metaphorically mining the landscape, the artists in Bottomland present alternative understandings of the local, from monuments to native flora. Formal aspects of the show draw on extractive and additive methods used in the construction of the built environment, redefining topographies, installing announcement systems, and placing signage to direct traffic through the space. Performing burned prairie as spiritual rebirth, hybridizing gilgai as cardinal directors, and highlighting the mechanized maintenance of designed landscapes, the works interweave with the park to create a complex ecology of collective inquiry.

Sweet Pass is proud to present Niva Parajuli’s Chin Chin & Muck Muck (2021), the artist's first full scale sculpture and public project. Chin Chin & Muck Muck (whose title is taken from a song) offers a playful and colorful intervention in the “parklet” of the newly constructed 707 Townhomes in West Dallas. Made from pigmented gypsum, fiberglass, and wood; these various organic forms (amoebas, arcs, stumps) are harmoniously arranged in a common space inviting both the solitary and social. Considering the multiple sitelines of the surrounding architecture and the shifting of light throughout the day, Parajuli pulls from a lexicon of forms in his painting practice to provide a dynamic installation for residents and the surrounding community.