Gregg gave us a rundown of, well, basically his life, and
walked us through the different art projects that he has done over the years.
Some of his themes are the local environment, fish (because he loves fishing),
water, and glass. He mostly makes his art pieces as installations in galleries
but then will also occasionally do larger scale public projects.
He’s built several waterway structures/sculptures that
sort of encompass themes of the situation of water of the surrounding
environment. He mostly uses wood, and makes a lot different moving pieces. His
most well known waterworks were New England Waters, New England Dreams where he
built a giant wooden sculpture next to a lake that moved water up out of the
lake and then back into it at the end of the sculpture. Another water work
sculpture that he built was for the City of Reno, when he lived here, in City
Hall. It was during a drought in the Reno Tahoe area so it was a sensitive piece
but he used a lot of wood and metal and the piece as a whole resembled the old
mining contraptions. It was a piece that was perfect for the location.
Probably my favorite piece of Gregg’s was his Prairie
Dreams where he tried to recreate the environment of past Northern Iowa within
a gallery space. Northern Iowa used to be full of very tall grass, so Schlanger
suspended tables with soil in which he planted the tall grass seeds. He then
rigged a way for water to softly rain from above the grass. He also built a
nice bench with a tilted tin roof where the “rain” would softly patter and then
drizzle in front of the people at the bench. It looked like a truly beautiful project
that I would have loved to have witnessed in person.
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