Carbondale-based sculptor Leah Aegerter, pictured, collaborated with Connecticut artist Bunny Burson to make “The Common Code,” the new outdoor sculpture on the Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s campus.
Aspen Daily News file
Anderson Ranch Arts Center recently activated “The Common Code,” a new outdoor sculpture on its campus. It’s a collaboration between Connecticut artist Bunny Burson and Carbondale-based sculptor Leah Aegerter.
The piece is a large-scale sculpture that represents the interlocking forms of chromosomes found in human DNA. The bright yellow, blue and red colors symbolize those used by scientists to identify the components of DNA.
The sculpture will exhibit at Anderson Ranch for two years before moving on to another home. It’s part of the arts center’s “outdoor sculpture exhibition,” now in its fifth year.
Most of the pieces in the series were created by artists who have a personal connection to the ranch. Artists currently being exhibited in the series include Burson, John Buck, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Mark Handforth, Trey Hill, Jammie Holmes, Richard Lapedes, Jason Mehl, James Surls and Hank Willis Thomas.
Burson, who lives in Connecticut, remembers exactly when the idea for “The Common Code” came to her. “It was April the 1st, 2016 and I opened up the New York Times and saw the genome of the Zika mosquito that had been sequenced, and it was just gorgeous,” she said. “And I began to think about an art piece that mimicked the pattern of chromosomes using the bright colors that scientists use to study DNA.”
Burson had her own genome sequenced and decided she wanted to make a sculpture of her own chromosomes despite the fact she had previously worked in the two-dimensional realm.
In contemplating how to bring her sculpture to life, she thought of Leah Aegerter, a sculptor from Carbondale who worked at Anderson Ranch in digital fabrication and other computer techniques for creating art. Aegerter uses a combination of digital fabrication techniques and traditional processes in wood, paper and steel. Her work investigates her relationship to landscape and intimacy with material.
Connecticut artist Bunny Burson, pictured, collaborated with Carbondale-based sculptor Leah Aegerter to make the new outdoor sculpture on the Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s campus called “The Common Code.”
Courtesy of Anderson Ranch
Burson had met Aegerter in 2017 when she was working at the arts center and Aegerter was just an intern. Burson and Aegerter have collaborated on some small projects over the years.
“I was so impressed with how Leah could do everything, would do everything, had great ideas and was such a hard worker,” Burson said. “I just decided that Leah was somebody I didn’t want to lose touch with and I wanted to work with. There are several decades between us and I love the fact that I got to work with someone young and so competent and so creative on this project. I don’t plan this to be our last collaboration.”
Aegerter was quick to give Burson the lion’s share of the credit for the project
“I think that it is so much Bunny’s aesthetic and while I do consider it a collaboration, I do feel like this is Bunny’s vision in so many ways and the collaborative element was me helping her realize that vision through the design and fabrication because I have expertise in fabrication and construction and design, that’s more where I came in. I believe so strongly in the concept of the piece, and being a part of that, and having conversations with Bunny, that dialogue I think, was also a big contributing factor of the collaboration,” Aegerter said.
Burson also said she was inspired by the other outdoor sculptures at Anderson Ranch. The size of them made her want to delve into sculpture and the genome idea seemed like a good idea for the project.
Andrea Jenkins Wallace, vice president of artistic affairs at Anderson Ranch, said the collaboration is precisely the kind of connection the arts center tries to create with artists.
“Bunny and Leah’s partnership exemplifies the meaningful artistic connections that take root at the ranch — where ideas are born, collaborations flourish, and creative dialogue continues to ripple outward into the world,” Wallace said in a news release.
“The Common Code” is a new sculpture recently activated at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. The piece — a collaboration between Connecticut artist Bunny Burson and Carbondale-based sculptor Leah Aegerter — will be on display at the arts center for two years before moving to another home.
Courtesy of Anderson Ranch
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Aegerter gave Burson lessons on how to use Rhinoceros 3D software, a computer modeling application.
“That’s really where all this started,” Burson said. “I never dreamed it was going to be as big as it is and I never dreamed it was going to take as long as it took and and I never dreamed that Trump was going to have a 145% tariff on things coming from China, which is where this was fabricated.
“I learned about how difficult it is to have something made that big and get it here, and then get it installed and the whole learning process was such an incredible journey.”
The four types of nucleotides in DNA are adenine (green), thymine (red), guanine (blue) and cytosine (orange). The sculpture features the first three of these components, which accounts for the bright yellow, blue and red colors.
“I happen to like the colors, and I happen to like the energy that I get from them,’ Burson said. “It just seems like a life force with the primary colors. People have said it feels very childlike, almost inviting kids to come and climb on it. Nothing makes me more happy than to find out that people don’t have the same ideas when they walk away from it.”
In addition to that sense of playfulness, Aegerter said she hopes the piece conveys a sense of technological advancement.
“We really wanted it to feel like it was of the computer, of technology, which is a way of mimicking the fact that genome sequencing was such an important, scientific and technological discovery and a big sign of scientific progress in our history,” Aegerter said.
The biggest message Burson hopes to convey is the commonality of DNA codes.
“We’re 99.9% the same. Our chromosomes are the same, so this sculpture is really kind of a portrait of all of us. We have all these problems with one another, and we’re so divided at this point, and the message is that maybe we have a commonality that we ought to think about and try to understand one another better,” Burson said.