Alisa Dworsky works as an artist, architectural designer, builder and educator. Her work spans a broad range of scales which includes collaboration on the design of the Tip Top Building in White River Junction (38,000 sqft of artist’s studios, offices, retail) to development of a series of 9" X 4.5" aquatint prints. As an artist, Alisa works in a variety of media; her recent work includes a series of sculptures of croched nylon rope, a series of intaglio prints, graphite and charcoal drawing and large scale public installation.

In the fall of 2001 she completed the groundbreaking installation, "Luminous Fields: Longitude in Time", a mile long sculpture made of 1000 blue and green reflectors sited along Route 4 near Castleton and developed with The Vermont Agency of Transportation. She received two Vermont Arts Council grants and a Vermont Community Foundation grant in support of this project.

"It is also brilliant, in both senses of the word. With rows of green and blue reflectors that look like the handiwork of a road crew gone berserk, Dworsky uses the light and movement of a highway to reexamine our relationship with the rural landscape in a powerfully novel way" – Marc Awodey Seven Days

I am an artist living in a rural setting at the beginning of the twenty first century and I am interested in making drawings and sculptures which interpret the landscape that I experience. I have recently begun asking myself these two questions: what is the nature of the American pastoral landscape today and what does it mean to be an artists living and creating in the contemporary rural setting?

The American ideal of the pastoral has always been that of a cultivated garden in which the mark of the human hand was made visible upon the wilderness. I love this landscape, the ordered rows of corn fields, the pure geometries imposed on the Midwestern farm belt as seen from an airplane, the regular and irregular texture of stone walls. Today, rural landscapes are not only mediated by physical human labor, this landscape is also mediated by our use and understanding of science and technology. I walk a ridge amongst the foothills of the green mountains carrying with me a geological survey map in which the high points and watersheds translate into interval and line. If I carried a global positioning system at any given moment I could identify my location as an idealized point upon a grid indicated by latitude and longitude. A computer program can model the shape of the hill I climb.

My drawings and sculptures are influenced by the landscape and by scientific and technological systems designed to quantify the landscape. In the forest I remember that there is a horizon line out there somewhere but my immediate experience (particularly in a sapling grove that has recently overtaken a field) is of a world where vertical and horizontal resonate with each other, and light is refracted, catching objects here and there. I consider the wooded landscape to be a kind of natural weaving and I think about weavings a great deal when I draw and create sculpture. The roll of the Vermont terrain and the weather also inform my work. From a hillside one can see the shape of a rainsquall and the pattern of the wind defined by the moving snow. Yet I must recognize that technological and scientific interpretations of the natural world influence the way I see this landscape. I think of computer drawings, topographical maps and the most basic principles of physics when I make art. I carry with me the knowledge that we can perceive photons, electrons, protons, and neutrons as behaving like waves or like particles but we can never capture (record) these two behaviors simultaneously in an experiment. Whether wave or particle, it seems that intervals give character to matter, and in matter there is constant movement. I am interested in drawing this movement whether on paper as a two-dimensional artwork or on the landscape as a three-dimensional sculpture.

I work as an artist, architectural designer, carpenter and teacher of art and architecture. These varied pursuits inform one another. Similarly my artwork in one media will help to shape my work in another media. My recent sculpture of 1000 reflectors illuminated by the passing cars along Route 4 Castleton Vermont, "Luminous fields: Longitude in Time", has strongly influenced the abstract charcoal drawings presented in this show. My crocheted sculpture has developed in tandem with my graphite drawings. The prints from the drawings.