HOUSE OF BLUES

This summer, the Aspen Art Museum feathers its nest with color: Director Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson tells us how.

PETER COFFIN found inspiration for his Aspen Art Museum project in an unlikely subject: the Australian satin bowerbird. Just as beavers are the only mammals that serve as architects for their own structures, satin bowerbirds are probably the only birds that serve as interior designers of their own nests. The male birds try to make their nests as attractive as possible to a female bird with which (of course) they hope to mate. Originally male bowerbirds only incorporated objects from nature, but as humans have encroached more and more into the Outback, they now often bring in man-made objects and human detritus. The only unchanging requirement for each nest-worthy component: It must be blue.

Coffin’s research foray into the color blue turned up the following tidbits, among others: According to several rabbinic sages, blue is the color of God’s glory. Gauloises Blue (from the French brand of cigarettes) was Picasso’s favorite color. PepsiCo once proposed an ad campaign that included projecting blue light onto the surface of the moon. Blue eyes have become increasingly rare among children — now appearing in only 16 percent of the U.S. population. Blue skies. Blue suede shoes. Lord Byron described the ocean as “deeply, darkly, beautifully blue.”

As the museum’s Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence, Coffin is constructing—one element at a time—a sort of human-scale bowerbird nest. The structure begins with a blue 1985 Toyota Land Cruiser, which Coffin spent his residency this spring driving around the Roaring Fork Valley, collecting blue objects. The car is stationed in the lower gallery of the museum, along with blue bunk beds and a large blue pool slide. The following blue items also appear there: an inflatable hot tub filled with pit balls, a disco ball, bowling pins, a Christmas tree, bean-bag chairs, musical instruments, and lights. Coffin’s project (on exhibit through July 24) is both additive and interactive: Museum visitors are invited to add their own blue items, and to climb around, slide down, and spend time in the nest.

Now based in New York, Coffin was born and raised in Berkeley, California, which perhaps makes his interest in the spiritual, the esoteric, and the supernatural not entirely surprising. Last year Coffin flew a UFO—a flying saucer equipped with LED lights—above a city in Poland. The effect was both eerie and seductive. His other projects include a series of Colby posters — all 80 of which are mounted in a horizontal band, mimicking a psychedelic yet imperfect sunset around the museum gallery. Here Coffin worked with another type of pre-existing form, the cheaply mass-produced concert posters plastered all over Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, and other urban centers. Each poster is comprised of a three-barred color-field pattern reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting. Coffin created 80 new color variations, which he presents as abstract images, absent of the traditional black, stamped-ink texts. The Colby Company liked Coffin’s color patterns so much that they incorporated some of them into their product range.

Back here in Aspen, Coffin’s museum project springs off of the natural beauty and wonder of our surroundings, and offers back a playful, inspired response to our incredible blue skies, nesting birds, and sunsets. Nature meets art meets nature, and on the cycle goes.